Back in 2001 Thomas Davenport wrote an article which sort of changed my world. He described a new economy driven not by the ability to manufacture or deliver goods and services better than ones competitors but by the ability to garner and maintain human attention. It took a while for this to sink in but as we sit in 2008 and look at the rise and rise of eBusiness and the (now 10 years old) ‘G’ business it all seems so obvious.

The practical implications of this for small businesses are profound. The Internet has always had a habit of being a great leveler. eCommerce gave the smallest of businesses access to the largest of markets thus allowing competition with the big boys. However the eyeconomy has tended to work against this. Google’s domination of search and the ability to ‘buy’ eyeballs for your brand has stunted many an entrepreneurial web start-up. Great ideas, products and services are nothing if you can’t get them seen.

Tom Pindar OBE, Chairman of the family owned printing business where i started my career used to recite a great Yorkshire saying when persuading his customers to spend more on their printed publications. It went thus :

He who whispers down the well
About the goods he has to sell
Will never make as many dollars
As he who stands aloft and hollers

In 2008 this stands equally true and I propose a ‘remix’ version. Here goes:

He who ventures on the net
May very well be quite upset
Unless he understands statistics
Pay per click and analytics

OK, so it’s not quite as succinct or snappy; but neither is building an online business compared to a brick-built counterpart.

I talk to lots of businesses with great ambitions and amazing ideas on the net. However, the ratio of their time and money spent on building online stores to that understanding online hollering is almost always far too low. Too few realize just how plentiful information has now become. Conversely, few realise just how scarce browsers’ attention is on the net.

Anybody can build an eCommerce site, but not everybody can attract attention to it.  Online businesses who understand and manage attention will forge ahead of their competitors; they must pay attention to attention if they are to remain differentiated and competitive.

Things you might be interested in: eStore

A new web browser that’s a big enough event to make it on the radio news as I drove home last night got me wondering if we haven’t been here before? Google’s launch of the Chrome browser certainly gave the world something to think about, but listening to all the words I can’t help but feel a strong sense of déjà vu. It’s true what the news reports said: it seems to perform very well when we downloaded it this morning & tried it (remember this is a Beta version and it could cause problems on your PC).

I can remember a time when internet pages were simple and very rarely changed; in fact some would say they were boring. Now we use the internet dynamically: we upload videos to YouTube, we buy things from trading sites; we pay our car tax; we use online services such as Yahoo mail which need a high level of interaction; and what we look at is constantly changing like BBC or Sky news. The problem is that the web browsers that we use have been updated since those early days, but by adding the support for the new functionality to an old core which means that they sometimes slow down when displaying modern content. Building a new product has allowed the guys & girls who write the software to concentrate on the problems we’re getting in these days of contemporary internet use.

Our business is wrestling with the challenges as we conduct more business on-line and Google Chrome will make a big impact in supporting the types of interaction that we want as human beings. Overall I think this is big news for us and we long term will see more changes to how we present information to our users and customers as a result of this launch.

Some commentators are saying that Chrome is even bigger than a new web browser; in fact some are saying it could be a whole new computing platform to compete with the PC. The fact that Google are making the technology available free to anyone who wants it will drive other technology companies to adopt it & use it.

So should you download & use Chrome? There are some web sites that work better when you use the Microsoft Internet Explorer (“IE”) browser, so I wouldn’t throw that away just yet. After all it works well, and the automatic Microsoft security updates offer a good level of protection that serves the majority of people very well. If, like me, you use a different web browser such as Firefox, then Chrome is going to be worth taking a look at if you don’t mind having to switch back to Microsoft IE for the occasional web site.

But…(you knew there was going to be a “but”)… I don’t expect Microsoft or Mozilla (the folks who product Firefox) to take this lying down now the gauntlet has been thrown down. Firefox 3 has just been launched which provides much better performance, and Internet Explorer 8 is expected to be with us soon. I think a few software teams are going to be working hard now to compete with the new pretender. Of course, Microsoft was once the new pretender when it launched Internet Explorer and we saw Mozilla rapidly respond. As I said, Déjà vu!