Over the next few weeks, Web 2.0 analyst Dion Hinchcliffe will be posting a series of articles that deeply explore a strategy for using the power of Web 2.0 ideas to move businesses into the 21st century. He’ll begin exploring each quadrant in this diagram (below, taken from Hinchcliffe’s blog), looking at how to use 2.0 to dramatically create growth, transform the customer relationship to drive revenue, drive operational costs down, improve productivity, safely restructure our business models, effect change, and leverage/harnessing innovation.

For some reason though, I didn’t manage to install or run Chrome on my desktop PC yesterday. Still wondering whether that has anything to do a coincidental Windows update on the PC just before that. Anyway, I’m intrigued by what Keso has written about Chrome, in particular:

I think the real reason for Google to join the browsers bandwagon two years ago are this: Google needs control of a browser that has sufficient influence. It also needs to set up de facto standards through something that can be controlled and demonstrated.

Therefore, what’s important about Chrome are these two things: A new JavaScript engine V8 and a “Webified” version of the desktop app Gears. Both are part of Google’s key strategy to expand browser functions to better support future Web apps.

We often naively assume that Desktop battles are waged for the purpose of establishing Trojan horse pipelines. Actually, the smarter purpose of such battles is not for thievery or user base, but for the establishment of de facto standards that are advantageous to one’s future plans. For Google, this standard will enable its apps to run perfectly regardless of the platform or terminal that anyone may use. In order to better release its “cloud of accumulated energy”, Google needs a well-supported standard and a popular browser.

Therefore, Google has chosen not to integrate many of its own products and services into Chrome. Some people complain that one can easily install Google Toolbar on IE, but not on Chrome. Actually, there’re many more things that one cannot do on Chrome: visit Gmail with one click, publish easily from Blogger, upload video to YouTube, and even customize the default search engine…

Like Chrome, V8 and Gears are released as open-source projects. This will undoubtedly enhance their neutrality and therefore appeal to developers. It doesn’t matter how much market share Chrome will claim eventually. The key is whether it can provide the best demonstration of Gears and V8, thereby enabling them to become de facto standards.

Some people say that the target of Chrome is neither IE nor Firefox but Windows. Considering the line of “cloud”, apps and browser, I basically agree with this judgement.

What would you do, and why? Just tick one of the options/boxes below. You can also add a new option (by clicking here (scroll to the bottom to enter a new and preferred option — remember to click the box to cast your vote!), or add a comment (by clicking the “Discuss this Poll” link below).

Apparently when Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, first knew each other in their undergrad days in Stanford, they clashed incessantly, debating over many things. Jokingly, Page said he thought Brin was arrogant. Brin retorted that Page was obnoxious, “We had a kind of bantering thing going.” In the reporter’s words, “they were clearly drawn together – two swords sharpening one another.” Later however, it was their shared obsession with backlinks that started something big.

When Page and Brin began searching for topics for their doctoral theses, they kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found themselves attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.

“Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes – a classic graph structure… The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students… Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it…

“Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author’s argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there’s even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.

“…it was Tim Berners-Lee’s desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation – the practice of pointing to other people’s work in order to build up your own.”

This is interesting, but very, very counter intuitive:

“In their book Moral Intelligence (Wharton School Publishing, May 2005), Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel say there’s a correlation between moral principles and business success. The companies that perform best, they believe, have leaders with not only a strong moral compass, but also the good sense to follow it.”

Actually, I’m NOT surprised by this.

YES, WORLDLY INTELLIGENCE often suggests that one needs to strategize (or plot), position (or present) oneself and manage (or manipulate) others.

However, the importance of moral intelligence IS intuitive to people who believe strongly in God (or karma) and ethical behavior (or cause-and-effect). On a non-religious note, as customers, wouldn’t (and don’t) we patronize repeatedly those who give good honest value and avoid those who don’t?

N.R. Narayana Murthy (chairman of Infosys Technologies), by the way, had spoken on the correlation between good business and moral principles when he gave a talk at NUS one or two years ago. This article, dated June 1999, gave a glimpse of this and reported how “Leading Indian business houses are witnessing a resurgence of values and ethics that may, in the long run, help turn the tide of recession.”

Another article from Strategic Marketing, dated Oct 2004, also highlighted the importance of moral intelligence. Smart companies, it says, “have a long-term approach to business. Customer retention is the purpose of their business. Profit is just the by-product… In business context, building lifelong relationship between the supplier and the customer means creating a strong bond – a strong bond of love and trust that cannot be broken by any competitor; a strong bond that grows stronger everyday.”

A key difference between Lennick & Kiel and the other writers is perhaps credibility (or authority)?

According to editorial notes at Amazon.com, “Doug Lennick led 14,000 professionals and support teams at American Express Financial Advisors to unparalleled success. Today, in addition to his work as managing partner of the Lennick Aberman Group, he continues to work directly with American Express Company’s CEO, retaining the title of EVP and focusing on workforce culture and performance. He is known worldwide for his expertise in driving business results by improving managers’ emotional competence.

“Fred Kiel, Ph.D., co-founder of KRW International, Inc., brings over 30 years of experience to his work with Fortune 500 CEOs and senior executives on building organizational effectiveness through leadership excellence and aligning organization with mission. Kiel is often called the “father of executive coaching” for his pioneering work in this field. Before founding KRW, Kiel worked with senior executives in private practice, developing a rigorous data-gathering and customized development process designed to provide executives with transformative feedback.”

“VISIONS ARE EXTREME HALLUCINATORY daydreaming, too-good-to-be-true ideals with high impact but no measurable probability — because they can’t happen. They’re fantasy. No one believes in them. Not even you. They’re fiction…

“If you have ever heard a truly compelling vision of what the world could be “if only…” from anyone else in your life, this is the place to finally write it down. Anonymity is best since you may hold back if others know your name. A good vision would contain fantasy elements from all utopias you ever believed in, and several that you laughed at, and riduculed other people for.

“If you are describing something that you consider a reasonable goal, that you believe can ever actually happen to any substantial degree, or has a measurable probability, it is a best case and not a “vision”. Be very careful with this distinction — best cases are something we allocate real w:human capital and (indirectly) w:natural resources to get done… a single good vision, however, would break us, were we even to really attempt it.”

WAS A VICTIM OF “extreme hallucinatory daydreaming” while working on a be-all do-all elearning project at a MNC a few years ago.

Our target audience included teaching staff, students and business partners across all educational sectors (K-12, tertiary, adult and corporate) in Asia Pacific countries. The super-duper system was touted to have all the features available in existing competitor systems (which were each targetting only specific sectors) and much more. For example, courseware of many subjects across all levels; on-the-fly personalizable learning, assessment and tracking; on-the-fly booking of virtual classrooms with audio and video streaming; on-the-fly XML data exchange with all types of e-services that might be provided by industry partners such as e-libraries, e-printers, e-publishers, e-translation, online payment gateways…

Surely, with such fantastic features, marketing should be a breeze, sales would boom, customers would be happy and everyone would have cause to smile?

However, we had just half a year and a very lean team to achieve all these from scratch. Still, the business folks thought of themselves as great visionaries and assumed that so long as some programmers and analysts got onboard, anything technical or editorial (a “black box” to them) could be produced (almost like magic!). This was supposed to be the easy part.

The reality was: there were too many dreams, promises and requirements; yet too little time (left from the endless meetings), manpower and resources. Plus XML was a new technology and elearning standards were not quite there yet (not even today). The dreams soon turned into nightmares. Eventually, the super-duper project joined the ranks of hundreds (or was it thousands?) of other dot.coms (or dot.cons) and went bust.