“We think the Palm Pre is by far the best product we’ve ever shipped and I am very happy with how we are managing the launch,” CEO Jon Rubinstein said on an earnings call Thursday, though he refused to disclose actual sales numbers. “We are successfully ramping supply to meet demand that is strong and growing.”

Rubinstein gave strong emphasis to Palm’s new operating system. “The most important indicator of our success is that customer response has been simply great, especially to Palm webOS. Just as Palm pioneered PDAs in the 90s, we believe it has now pioneered the mobile operating platform for the next 10 years and beyond. WebOS integrates information and services from the cloud and offers a true multi-tasking environment. We feel it takes better advantage of the benefits of Web 3.0 than any other mobile platform available today.”

Quite a claim, especially given the incumbents in the market and Palm’s history. The company has never been strong on execution, and while it’s done a great job of bringing the Pre and webOS to market, it has clearly stumbled a bit. Thanks to supply constraints, Palm may be leaving some sales on the table. And it hasn’t done itself any favors by delaying the release of the webOS software development kit.

WebOS won’t be the “the mobile operating platform for the next 10 years and beyond” unless developers are actually, you know, writing applications for it. And there are far too few of them doing that right now because Palm has, so far, restricted access to the SDK.

Rubinstein says that will soon change, though. “We are eager to expand access to our SDK but we need to do so in a measured and methodical fashion, so we can be sure we are providing a great development experience,” he said Thursday. “Over the next few weeks, we expect the program to grow from hundreds to thousands of developers and our goal from there is to make our SDK available to everyone by the end of this summer.”

OK. So Palm would rather do things right than too quickly. That’s understandable–especially if it has more products in the pipeline, as it most certainly does. Given the rivals against which it must compete, the company cannot afford even a single misstep. If it is to truly to revitalize its brand, it must execute, as Rubinstein well knows.

“My highest priority is execution,” he said. “That means delivering world-class products and customer support. Operational excellence in our supply chain management. Strong carrier relationships. Great sales and marketing. Strong back-office functions….Palm already has a foundation in all of these areas. We’ve been in this business for years. We have long-established industry relationships and we’ve successfully brought mobile products to market for over a decade. This footing can create a real advantage.”

But only if it’s managed well. So far, so good. We’ll find out how Palm’s really doing next quarter, which will more fully reflect the impact of the Pre.

You’ll find more notes from yesterday’s call here.

This latest swing of the ax brings total job cuts at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) to about 22,500 since the 2006 merger that created it. And though the company will be leaner and meaner for it, that new found agility won’t count for much without a shift in business strategy bold enough to reverse the brutal reduction in market share and market capitalization Alcatel-Lucent has suffered. And an oblique and, frankly, baffling mention of Web 2.0, does not a business strategy make.

Alcatel-Lucent’s plan is to “combine the trusted capabilities of the network environment with the creative communications services of the Web (Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and beyond).” What the hell does that mean?

The answer’s obvious isn’t it? Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Why? Because he says so, that’s why.

Speaking at the company’s DreamForce Europe event, Benioff said that Web 3.0 will be the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) era. A fascinating definition–convenient too, since this is precisely the sort of business Salesforce.com (CRM) is in. “We think Web 3.0 is now upon us. It’s the era of platforms,” said Benioff. “New platforms are coming right out of the cloud. It’s time to make a choice. You can continue to build your applications in the software model or you can move your applications to the new model of cloud computing. There is a new way to build your applications.”

So Web 3.0 is not, as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, once suggested, the semantic Web–”day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives handled by machines talking to machines.” Rather, it’s Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. The “Whatever-I-Say-It-Is Web”–the “Al Franken Decade” of the Internet age.

Well, the “me” decade is almost over, and good riddance, and far as I’m concerned. … That’s right. I believe we’re entering what I like to call the Al Franken Decade. Oh, for me, Al Franken, the ’80s will be pretty much the same as the ’70s. I’ll still be thinking of me, Al Franken. But for you, you’ll be thinking more about how things affect me, Al Franken. When you see a news report, you’ll be thinking, ‘I wonder what Al Franken thinks about this thing?’, ‘I wonder how this inflation thing is hurting Al Franken?’ And you women will be thinking, ‘What can I wear that will please Al Franken?’, or ‘What can I not wear?’ You know, I know a lot of you out there are thinking, ‘Why Al Franken?’ Well, because I thought of it, and I’m on TV, so I’ve already gotten the jump on you.”

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics–everything rippling and folding and looking misty–on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.”

–Tim Berners-Lee, May 2006

Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over the last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium … the distinction between professional, semiprofessional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.”

–Jerry Yang, co-founder and CEO of Yahoo, November 2006

“Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average one megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0.”

–Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, November 2006

Had to happen sooner or later, right? The lexicographers who gave us the term Web 2.0 have finally gotten around to issuing an “official” definition of Web 3.0 and, having undoubtedly scurried to trademark the term, are probably already plotting the pricey industry conference that will accompany it.

So what is Web 3.0, “officially”?

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”
–Jason Calacanis

In other words it’s Web 2.0 2.0, Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. Or, as Josh Kopelman, managing director of First Round Capital, aptly puts it, “any Internet-based company that has launched after 2004.“