Earthlink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK) is a dial-up and broadband provider that has been stuck in the mud for the last year. Although Wall Street's focus this week will be on the company's earnings, due out before the bell Thursday, I think you, the individual investor, need to focus on the long-term perspective on this stock.

While I'm not saying that Earthlink is going to have a bad quarter (I simply don't have enough insight into this quarter), I'm arguing that Earthlink's long-term potential easily trumps any short-term opportunity in the stock.

Basically, the company is losing subscribers every quarter for its dial-up business, a business that is clearly technologically inferior to broadband and other new internet connection offerings. But the company is adding voice and "PeoplePC" subscribers every quarter. For those unfamiliar with PeoplePC, it is a discount dial-up service with speeds 5x as fast as normal dial-up. This product is very popular in lower- to middle-class families who want an upgrade from dial-up but don't want to pay broadband prices. Lastly, the company offers municipal wireless services.

First, the specs: the iPhone 4GB model will be $499 and will ship in June (not, it turns out, January 15th). It will run Cingular and Yahoo! IMAP email. Shivers. This is one phone I'm dying to own.

How will Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)'s iPhone be different from every other "mobile communication device" out there? How? Just tell us, Steve. It will be done without a keyboard... without a stylus... thanks to the patented power of "multi-touch."


Hmmm. Well, whatever that is, it's certainly lovely. In Engadget's live coverage of Steve Job's MacWorld keynote address, the photos have been rolling out like so much gadget porn.

Yum. But, as they say in the business, "that's not all."

Steve Jobs knows his audience. And the audience at the MacWorld 2007 conference keynote (speaker, as always, the mock-turtlenecked Steve Jobs, but in brown -- a jab at the Zune perhaps?) had been camping out 'since nine the night before.

So it was to no small applause when he took the stage around 9 a.m. here on the West Coast. And everyone was on the edges of his and her seat waiting for the Big News.

Naturally, in our opinion here, the Big News is the iPhone. We've been wondering about it for months, giving it optimistic release dates (hey, still could happen, right?) and wondering whether Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) could even call it that, given that the trademark to the name is owned by Linksys. And, basically, loving it from afar. Well, it's true, and it is called the iPhone, and Engadget reports Jobs saying that it will be a "leapfrog product," it will include an iPod (duh), a widescreen with touch controls, and it will be a "breakthrough internet communications device," whatever that is.

Also big news from Steve was that the Apple TV will be shipped in February; lots of details over at Engadget, photos of the interface and lots of details on how it will work. There is also ridiculous eye candy coming up every minute on the iPhone. I can't wait to do a montage!

I'm attending the 2006 Blogher Conference in San Jose, California, and many of the net femarati are here. I just finished listening to an enlightening talk by the co-founder of Blogger (now owned by Google), Meg Hourihan, and the co-founder of flickr (now owned by Yahoo!), Caterina Fake. Moderator Marnie Webb pointed out that both of the products for which the two speakers are famous, were accidental by-products of their respective companies' original mission.

Fake was working with her co-founders on a role-playing game, while Hourihan was working on project management software. Declaring the concept of a stealth period "dead," the flickr co-founder mentioned that user feedback was central in determining how the photo sharing software would be shaped; and Hourihan echoed that sentiment with regards to the very useful blogging software her company, Pyra, developed just for fun. "If we had started out to create a photo sharing site, it never would have happened," said Fake. "We would have done market research, and discovered that all the money was in on-demand printing, and that took too much capital investment, and we'd never make money. We would have decided it wasn't worth it."

It's quite an interesting detail of product history and it's amazing to think how many great, world-changing products were accidental. What's more, it's worth considering from a management strategy point of view: how does a company encourage its employees to invest time in offshoots of the central strategy, and then fail to analyze those happy accidents to death? Are big companies forever destined to buy these providential mistakes simply because they never would have made sense, had they been "product developed"? Even Google, king of the entrepreneurial, "throw it up against the wall and see what sticks" spirit, had to buy Blogger. Which companies are best positioned to find and care for accidental successes?