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In the good old days enterprise software vendors could sell vaporware. In the good old days you could throw enough money at a deficient product or service and you could actually sustain sales growth. Dissatisfied people could be contained in isolated pockets and companies staged carefully rehearsed case studies and testimonials. You could lie effectively.

This is no longer possible. Today if you try to sell a deficient product or service, the prospective customer will find a negative review buried deep in an obscure blog, written by someone who experienced your product pain, firsthand. A couple more of these public comments and you are toast.

The Internet has made the cost of lying unbearable. If your company has a bad DNA, i.e., you lie to your employees, screw your suppliers, mistreat your customers or you simply don't care, that underlying corporate culture will surface in the web slowly but surely. You cannot contain the bad episodes that will pop out of your deficient culture.

So the only way to be on the Internet for the long haul is to be honest and open. Remove the marketing bulls**t  from your site and say it like it is. Don't oversell. And don't hide stuff. Or lie. People will get disappointed. And disappointed people create bad rep. 

Finally a world where you can be honest and come up at the top. And not feel dumb about it.

A friend of mine had a small business reselling business copiers and printers in Évora, in the interior of Portugal. After 5 years of battling he folded in, selling his business for peanuts. The reason? Big corporations and the Internet. In his words "I cannot compete with these [big] sites that sell printers at such a low price".

What my friend did not realize was that behind some of these "big" sites, there are usually very small operations. This is the beauty of the Internet as a business medium. As long as you act respectfully, honestly, fast and urgently you can pretend you are big. And for all purposes you are big.

If you are a small regional entrepreneur being wiped out by global competition you need to start thinking along these lines. Before, you contracted global products and sold them in your local market. Now you should focus on contracting local goods (or local skills) and sell them globally. Ask the questions: Does your region provide something unique that tourists always buy when they go there? Do you have a set of local people with uncommon skills that your local market cannot exhaust?

The opportunity is to be the conduit between local supply and global demand. Use your local knowledge to establish supply relations and use the Internet to get in touch with your new dispersed, global market.

You got laid off. You're sick and tired of working for companies who embarrass you in the marketplace. Maybe it is a good idea to start a business of your own. But what?

When you are stuck coming up with an idea for a new business, think about pain. Is there a group of people that has some pain and needs relief? Most of the time the pain is not obvious. It is like one of those ongoing backaches we have had for years and which we got use to. You have to look beyond the obvious to the non-obvious. And then think about a service or product that works as an aspirin.

Getting a plumber in Lisbon is a challenge. Not finding one, mind you. That is not the pain. The pain is getting one to arrive on time, within a range of 15 minutes. They will tell you they will be there "in the morning" or "after 3pm". They keep you wondering and make you waste a vacation day waiting at home _ that is pain. So the aspirin here is creating a plumber service that will avoid you having to waste a vacation day. If you are like me and all my neighborhood you will pay a premium for time.

Find the pain. And then, only then, think about the cure.