Facebook’s latest crisis of trust has landed the mega-social network at a crucial crossroads, and its relevancy just may be hanging in the balance. To survive, CEO Mark Zuckerberg needs to snag a page from James Burke’s playbook. Burke, the late CEO of Johnson & Johnson, successfully navigated his company through the Tylenol scare 35 years ago.

Find out how – and see what lessons there are for Facebook. Read my latest CIO Magazine column HERE.

Have you ever faced a purchasing decision so weighty and daunting that you delayed or avoided it altogether?

I have a name for the phenomenon. I call it “Threshold Syndrome,” or TS. People with TS know that what they want is waiting for them on the other side of the proverbial door. But the gravity of the decision keeps them from passing through. They worry that the cost of making a bad choice could be life-altering. So they linger in the doorway.

IT buyers know TS all too well. They typically come down with it when they take on new network deployments. Because they know that once they pull the trigger, they’ll be locked into a vendors’ system. Which means that they go as the vendor goes. If the vendor raises prices for new hardware or tacks on maintenance fees for new services, then they pay more. And if the vendor is late with new hardware, then the state-of-the-network lags.

Fortunately for network decision-makers, an antidote for TS is gaining momentum in the marketplace: open Wi-Fi. By giving IT the power to mix and match compatible hardware, software and services from different vendors, open Wi-Fi effectively breaks down big deployment decisions into smaller, more palatable choices. If the access points turn out to be disappointing, for example, IT can turn to a different supplier for upgrade and expansion.

Naturally, prices will come down and quality will rise once vendors are forced to compete at every turn. It’s one reason FeibusTech is forecasting growth in enterprise Wi-Fi deployments to accelerate.

Open Wi-Fi is gaining steam in the marketplace. At the Open Compute Project’s annual US Summit this week, in fact, the 3,000 or so attendees and exhibitors will be treated to Wi-Fi connectivity by way of the first-ever all-open, large-scale deployment, courtesy Mojo Networks and Edgecore Networks. It’s a significant, if symbolic, milestone in the legitimacy of open Wi-Fi.

And, in the process, we’re one step closer to stamping out TS in the enterprise.

Facebook founded the Open Compute Project seven years ago with a vision of building powerful, cost-efficient datacenters and networks. So imagine how demotivating it would have been for attendees and exhibiters at the OCP’s US Summit next week in San Jose to be forced to connect to the internet over pricey, proprietary Wi-Fi networks.

Two OCP members decided that was unacceptable, and decided to do something about it. So together, Mojo Networks and Edgecore Networks built the first large large-scale open Wi-Fi network for the 3,000 Summit attendees and exhibitors, spanning 75,000 square feet of the San Jose Convention Center. Mojo’s cloud-managed suite, Cognitive WiFi, is serving as the network’s operating system for Edgecore’s access points.

Now that’s motivation!

Don’t get enough sleep? You’re not alone. One third of us don’t get the sleep we need to let our mind and body recover from today, and to get us ready for tomorrow.

Sleep tech is coming of age this year. Read about it in my latest USA Today column.