The Google corporate website proudly displays its "ten principles" as if it were the corporate equivalent of the Constitution. But Google seems to have already violated its first principle (focus on the user and all else will follow) and is moving down the path to violating its second (it's best to do one thing really, really well). For every competitor looking to make inroads against this search giant, these are the first signs of opportunity.

The recently released Forbes list of America’s billionaires is chock-full of the usual suspects--oil-magnates, captains of the computer industry, and world-famous financiers. But one person seems incongruous among the bunch. Tied with the ever-present and ever self-promoting Donald Trump as the 153rd wealthiest person in the country is Ty Warner. For those of you who don’t recognize or remember the beanie baby craze of the 1990s, Mr. Warner is the creator of that era-defining product. Mr. Warner has since expanded his empire to include real estate and other holdings, but the foundation of his wealth was this simple stuffed animal.

In 2006, after only two years on the market, Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for one billion dollars. At the time, the fate of Facebook was unclear. Myspace had more than ten times the number of members and membership growth at Facebook was slowing. Despite the opportunity for instant riches and the long odds against Facebook overtaking Myspace, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously rejected the offer. For a twenty-three year old in the business world, this is a decision equivalent to George Washington deciding to not run for a third term as President. Very few people would have predicted that within four years Mark Zuckerberg would be the world’s youngest billionaire and the Time’s Person of The Year.

The iPad 2 is here. It will certainly dominate tablet sales this year, but it is not the future of the tablet. The demand for Tablets is forecast to grow exponentially this year and the iPad 2 and its numerous competitors working in copycat mode are all hoping to cash in on this demand. Apple’s domination of this category, along with the historical failures by big-time competitors like Microsoft, has created a mad rush to create iPad clones. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 tablets coming out this year, and most of them seem to have no better sense of purpose than to replicate the iPad. This is a doomed strategy, if it can be called as strategy at all. But the iPad and the majority of its competitors are focusing on a very narrow view of what the tablet can do.??