When I was growing up in Palo Alto in the 1960s, it was a town of engineers and Stanford professors. Today, it's the capital of Silicon Valley, the home of venture capitalists, titans of industry and $1 million teardowns.

More than anyone, Steve Jobs was responsible for the change.

Jobs was the prototype for all the famous entrepreneurs who followed him -- a college dropout who started a company in his Palo Alto garage. He didn't invent the personal computer. But he was the first person who had the vision and the balls to sell one to consumers.

Also read: Apple Fans Across the World Mourn Steve Jobs

Until then, the big tech news in Palo Alto was Hewlett-Packard. My dad used to come home with the latest HP...

AOL and Yahoo both revolutionized the Internet. And both have completely lost their way.

Back in the 1990s, AOL introduced millions of people to email and online content. Yahoo taught people how to find things online.

Now both seem reduced to saving their businesses, not innovating. In today’s lightning-fast tech cycle, that’s a recipe for failure.

Take AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s decision to sell advertising on each other’s sites to fight Google’s dominance. That’s like putting up levees to stop a hurricane: you know you’re still going to get clobbered in the long run. As if to spite them, Google...

Daniel Ek is an unlikely prophet for the music business.

The founder and CEO of Spotify is a computer geek who spouts terms like "real-time data trends" and "cost for distribution."

But the young Swede was (forgive me) spot on in his predictions at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. He sees two mega-trends that he believes will power his online music service from 10 million to 50 million users: social media and connected devices.

When you join Spotify through Facebook, you are immediately connected to your friends and can see their entire music library (yes, you control who sees that library).

As you learn about new bands, share your favorites and build playlists, your loyalty to the service will grow -- certainly more than your loyalty to Walmart, anyway.

"Back in the day, the most interesting part of...

Hindsight is always 20/20. Still, looking back on Rupert Murdoch's $580 million purchase of MySpace in 2005, it's possible to see a series of worrisome red flags. I present them forthwith so that you can pick out the next flops yourself -- and if you're a media mogul, maybe save you a billion or two.

To wit:

1. If you don't understand the business you're buying, don't buy it. News Corp. bought MySpace because it wanted a social media business, not because it fit the media company's core business. It had a vague idea that it would advertise its movies and TV shows throughout the site, but not much more than that. Since it didn't understand the business, it proceeded to run MySpace into the ground.

Time Warner's merger with AOL flopped for the same reason: Time Warner had few significant achievements...