Brian White
Oklahoma City, OK - http://

Brian White is a strong advocate of value investing and index funds, but has known to hold an equity or two from time to time. Financially speaking, he's covered the Fortune 500 for six years in various reporting and writing positions and currently owns a business consulting company. Additionally, Mr. White holds BA and MBA degrees.

So, it is pleasing to think that if the new Sprint-Clearwire venture can build out is national presence successfully and capture customers tired of limited high-speed internet service, the world will be its oyster. Of course, other companies are contributing to the venture as well, including Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Why would Google want to put money into this? Because this could be Google's most important investment ever.

Bypassing the telephone and cable companies that have a stranglehold on most of the high-speed internet business in the U.S. has long been the dream of Google. It doesn't want a middleman in the way of it connecting consumers and businesses with the information they seek. Although Google wasn't successful in the recent FCC radio auctions (maybe by design), finding a way to provide internet service directly to its customer base would give Google on a much more powerful perch than it has even today. Google could even buy the new Clearwire partnership outright once it's established.

I think they're starting to get giddy in the Google board room.

Welcome to the 59th installment of The Wal-Mart Weekly, a column dedicated to bringing you insight, wit, facts, results, opinions, and just a bit of everything else when it comes to a very hot topic these days: Wal-Mart.

In this week's Wal-Mart Weekly, I'll begin a multi-part column that takes a look inside some of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.'s (NYSE: WMT) annual shareholder meeting proposals. As many of you may know, Wal-Mart's annual shareholder's meeting happens in early June, about a month from now.

I covered it live from the show floor last year, where all 11 shareholder proposals were easily and soundly defeated. Nothing new here, as Wal-Mart's board has a habit of glossing past many proposals that would give its shareholders a glimpse into its internal operations.

So, let's start off by looking at a shareholder proposal that asks for more public visibility into Wal-Mart's political donations. This is a great question for the retailer, and one would think that if Wal-Mart has nothing to hide, it would open the transparency book to answer this proposal. We'll only know in a month when the meeting actually happens, but we'll consider what the retailer could do in this column. Visit this link to get a rundown on Wal-Mart's SEC Form 14A for its upcoming shareholder's meeting, and then join me after the break.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) has been around more than 30 years now and continues to make money hand over first every quarter. Its growth has slowed to levels representative of a mature company, but the power the computer software maker has over the flow of the world's information is very formidable. Then you have Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), a company just a decade old but with power that rivals Microsoft in many ways. In a sense, Microsoft provides the river, and Google provides the current.

That's probably not what Microsoft executives had in mind, but that's reality. The two companies are uniquely different cultures: Microsoft is a standard, dyed-in-the-wool, buttoned-down corporation and Google operates in an organized chaos type of way, much like a start-up software company. The difference is that Google's revenue and growth is slowly reaching where Microsoft's is, and it's only taken a fraction of the time.