By Charlie Gilkey

It’s easy for our own strategy to be determined by what our suppliers are doing. If we become too dependent, we risk having our strategy set by our suppliers rather than having them support our strategy.

I’ve been thinking a lot here recently about how much suppliers can direct your business. Part of this has to do with a lot of the infrastructure work I’ve been doing, and when you take stock of how easy it is for too many critical functions of your business to dependent on vendors, it’s a bit worrisome.

I’ve been test-driving Boomerang, a new service for Gmail that finally allows you to schedule when email messages go out, and I got an email from the company apologizing for the service disruption they had yesterday. It didn’t... More...