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The Art of Partnering: " When I went through the security line at San Francisco International Airport this morning, I noticed this laptop with an Apple sticker pasted over its Dell logo (click to enlarge the photo if you don't believe me). I thought this was very funny, so I asked its owner why he did this. He explained that he was tired of explaining why he had a Dell. I told him that I'd never heard of an Apple owner pasting a Dell sticker over the Apple logo, and he agreed that this was unlikely to happen. (At that point, he noticed my PowerBook's Tony Hawk autograph, but I digress...) This got me to thinking about how companies form partnerships--pasting each other's logos on products and services and ending up with crap. The fallacy of partnerships--and how “partner” became a verb--is rooted in the dot.com days of 1998-2000. During these years, most startups didn't have a business model, so they blew smoke about having “partnered” with big firms. Surely if a company partnered with Microsoft or IBM, it would be successful. To this day, whenever an entrepreneur uses “partner” used as a verb, it bothers me because I hear, “Bull-shitake relationship that isn't going to increase revenue.” However, I am not an angry little man, so in the spirit of improving what has become a flawed process, I offer The Art "