I always look out for pieces written by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, who was noted the other day in the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s leading business pundits. They tend to be intriguing, clever, full of great anecdotes and thoroughly enjoyable.

He is also, of course, the author of the best-sellers The Tipping Point, and Blink, which are both wonderful reads.

All the same, Gladwell has come under some scrutiny for allegedly, how to put this, making the best of his stories. That is to say, contriving that his evidence fits his latest all-encompassing theory a little too neatly.

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Having been travelling recently (I have just shifted from London, via New York and Washington, to Los Angeles for the Milken Institute Global Conference) I am sensitive to things that help or hinder the voyager.

In this context, I am struck by the fact that the wheel-along suitcase is one of the great consumer product inventions of recent years. I would go so far as to place it alongside the upside-down tomato sauce bottle as a transformative variation of an existing product.

Unfortunately, the industrial designers who come up with inventions such as this rarely gain the recognition they deserve. I wonder if the readers of this blog can think of other examples?

The battle between Microsoft and Google over the former’s lucrative and powerful Office suite of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and other software is fascinating.

It is difficult to see how Google, which is putting a lot of money and effort into its Google Apps suite, can lose since it is starting from zero while its competitor is trying to defend a giant franchise. In fact, I would bet that Google will do very well.

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Company-wide emails to staff are generally an imperfect way to communicate, since a chief executive cannot say anything too interesting for fear of a) it getting leaked or b) breaking financial disclosure rules.

The trick is to seem personable and appealing and generally leave people who bother to read the thing feeling a little bit happier than before.

By this standard, I think Jerry Yang’s leaked email to Yahoo employees following Microsoft’s hostile $44.6bn bid fails. The problem is that it suffers from cognitive dissonance.

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My Financial Times column this week is about Microsoft-Yahoo and the efforts of technology companies to revolutionise the selling of display advertisements on the internet. I am sceptical. You can give your views below.

Google is going to have to do better than this if it wants to frighten regulators and politicians into blocking Microsoft’s $44.6bn bid for Yahoo.

It is a bit half-baked to issue a statement (actually, not even an official statement but a blog post, for heaven’s sake) that raises worries about Microsoft distorting the internet without providing evidence, or even explaining what it means.

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Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, seems to have come to the same conclusion as me about his company’s struggles to create a series of proprietary formats that other electronics companies have to follow. This is what he had to say about the approach in the Financial Times last week:

We made a decision to make something proprietary and it sent the signal to the world that Sony was trying to own something. That decision was the wrong decision … it’s stupid for us to be arrogant and say we’re going to build a closed system especially when the competitors – Microsoft and Apple – are very strong. We’ve given up on the idea that [proprietary formats] is how we will make our money.

Sir Howard was talking about Sony’s efforts to promote its Atrac format for digital music files, which was an attempt to create a completely closed platform. The idea was that you would only be able to play digital music files encoded in Atrac on a Sony Walkman so that Sony would not only manufacture the device but control the content.

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So Sony did it. And, if it has any sense, it will never try to do it again. The battle between Sony’s Blu-Ray high definition video disc standard and the rival HD-DVD backed by Toshiba and others appears to be ending in a victory for Sony.

Sony staked an enormous amount on winning. It incorporated Blu-Ray technology in its Playstation 3 games console, which made it both expensive and late, presenting a bigger opportunity to Nintendo’s Wii. Blu-Ray is the only big technology platform battle it has won since its defeat in the well-known contest between its Betamax video tape standard and JVC’s VHS.

Actually, the entire structure of the company is a product of that standards war. Sony’s weird strategy of combining a Japanese electronics company with a US film studio stems from a determination to have the muscle to impose standards. As I wrote in a column three years ago: “If Sony cannot win the Blu-Ray battle, then what is Sony for?"

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Nick Carr notes that a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems last week predicted that a large data centre is likely to suffer a disastrous failure some time next year, causing the biggest information technology panic since the invention of the personal computer virus in 1988.

I don’t know if that is indeed likely but there is no doubt we now rely to a worrying extent on data centres of the kind that support Google, universities, businesses and governments. Think of a data centre failure as in your computer’s hard drive crashing and taking with it all your photos, music and documents, except on a much bigger scale.

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A belated note about Kindle, Amazon’s new e-book reader, which was launched last week.

I am less interested in the product itself than some of the reaction to it, which was an example of the abuse the inner circle of technology and media bloggers metes out to anything that does not fit its vision of how the world ought to work. There is a good review of some of the comments here on the FT Tech Blog, written by my colleagues in Silicon Valley.

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