You Get What You Pay For

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Google offers a lot of really cool web tools; most of them are free. The custom Google search feature that registered users can use on their web sites spent a good 12 hours offline yesterday.

Imagine the havoc that might cause for a shopping site.

My tip for the day: Free tools are aplenty all over the Internet. Some are better than others. The good ones (and to its credit; I would consider most, if not all, of the Google tools pretty solid) are a great way to save money up front in the early days of a business or a new initiative.

My advice, however, would be to switch to a paid service once your business gets a bit more established. It's a lot easier to hold a paid service provider accountable for outages and technical support.

Campaigning the HP Way

I can't resist giving this story a mention. Carly Fiorina, who's been spending her untimely retirement from Hewlett-Packard as an economic advisor to the McCain campaign, really fluffed it this time.

When asked if Sarah Palin was quailified to be the CEO of HP, she said "No".

Hey, she was honest!

The folks riding the aptly named "Straight Talk Express" were not too pleased. I'm guessing we won't be seeing much of Fiorina before the first Tuesday in November.

Let me just add that Fiorina wasn't qualified to be CEO of HP either. As I recall that was a push and not a jump into retirement.

Meg Whitman, of EBay acclaim, is also an economic advisor for McCain. So far, she isn't touching this one with a ten foot pole.

Question of the day: Is Carly Fiorina qualified to be Vice President? Can she field dress a moose?

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio