You need only look at the success of Chinese-made merchandise to see that "Made in USA" does not carry the cache it once did. Although calls to "Buy American" arise during any economic downturn, American consumers vote otherwise every time they hop into their Japanese-made car, fill it up with gasoline refined from foreign oil and motor over to Wal-Mart for the sale on patio furniture that was made in Mexico.

There is a plethora of disturbing news out there today. The economy, the bailout, the war on terror, you pick it. And if you’re still struggling with how to incorporate your traditional marketing with cost-effective, ROI-driven e-marketing, there’s even scarier news that came out recently.

OpenOffice.org 3   is the leading open-source office software suite  for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages  and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

You know very well how critical your data is to your organization and how much your business would be impacted were that data to become unavailable because of a major IT outage.  Organizations typically rely on traditional tape backup to guard against this eventuality. More comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) solutions that automatically maintain up-to-date copies of data at a remote location are desirable, but are often unaffordable for two reasons: either the solutions require very expensive equipment on both ends, or they require modifications to every host. The former is beyond the scope of the small to medium size enterprise, the latter is host-invasive, complex and difficult to manage.

Like a nimble professional driver navigating a multi-car crash on the racetrack, some brands are making slick moves through the troubled economy. And as they slip past the wreckage, they are hitting the branding accelerator hard to put distance between themselves and their rivals.