In recent days, Apple has paid some $700,000 in legal fees to the defendants in its failed action to locate the source behind revelations about an alleged product under development bearing the code-name Asteroid.

Although the product got lots of attention as a result of the lawsuits, it never saw the light of day. Supposedly an audio breakout box of some sort, there is no hint that such a gadget ever came close to release, or even that it ever went beyond a few sketches.

But what about the documents in the lawsuit, mentioning published reports about documents that were supposedly part of a presentation on Asteroid? Just what is going on here?

Well, it’s quite true that Apple, typical of technology companies in general, may have lots of products in various stages of development that never see the light of day. There are many reasons for this. In some cases, the goals for that project aren’t realized, or a marketing department decides that it just can’t succeed.

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Listen, despite the fact that my personal needs don’t really include an iPhone, I can well understand that it’s going to be a freaking awesome product for many of you. Whether you want a so-called “smartphone,” or just a cool gadget to show your friends, it comes across as a compelling package.

At the same time, it won’t be out till June, although some rumor sites are suggesting it might arrive earlier. After all, doesn’t Apple beat its deadlines more often than it meets them? Well, that depends, I suppose, on whether the public deadline and the private deadline are one and the same, and I’m not so sure about that.

Besides, if you promise to deliver something within a given time-frame, but know you can do it twice as fast, you end up gaining a lot of goodwill.

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A year ago, our daily bucket of junk mail had gotten way, way out of control. Hundreds of those messages polluted our various mailboxes every single day. It got so bad that it was near-impossible to check the spam captured by our Web hosts and email software for mistakes. In fact, I missed out on a small business opportunity because a message was mistakenly flagged as junk and it got lost in the shuffle. I called the client back too late to repair the damage.

No doubt you’ve had similar problems. You’re inundated with the stuff, and there’s just no time to find out where your ISP or email application goofed, but it does happen. In fact, even the best spam filters talk of 98% to 99% accuracy. That seems a pretty high average, but you have to check the spam folders anyway just to examine the mistakes and, you hope, retrain the spam filter.

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I have a history with GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar. That’s a company where you can register your Internet domains, and they do a huge business hosting your Web sites. You see, our Webmaster, Brent Lee, had been referring his clients to GoDaddy for several years, and suggested that I follow suit.

I remember that week, in the spring of 2006, quite well, when I spent several hours transferring our online files to their new homes. Understand that things were simpler then, because we didn’t use database-driven publishing tools for this site, and for the message board systems on the rest of our repertoire.

Today, this would be a problem, one that I had to overcome myself since our Webmaster went on a month-long hiatus. But that’s another story.

Although service had a few hiccups along the way, such as slow performance at times, it worked well for me, until one day I got an email from GoDaddy’s “Abuse” team about an alleged infraction, where I supposedly sent an ad to someone who claimed he didn’t request it.

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