[wpietri]

I still think ideas are basically worthless. That's certainly true literally; 20 years in software and I've never heard of anybody selling one for significant money. First-mover advantage can sometimes be helpful, but it rarely determines success. Look at Amazon, Google, and Facebook, for example: leaders in their categories, but none of them was first.

A person with a brilliant idea who can't execute well is almost certainly screwed. A company that starts with a bad idea and executes well can turn out fine, though. That's because in the startup context, great execution involves a lot of exploration, validation, and the now-ubiquitous pivoting.

Take PayPal. Their first idea was two-factor authentication for handhelds. That turned into money transfer via handhelds. Which turned into a web-based money transfer product. But that wasn't the real deciding factor; the IP that let them win was anti-fraud software. And the reason there's a PayPal Mafia is that the execution-focused culture kept creating successes long after the original idea was played out.

Even supposing that there's an occasional rare idea that actually has some value, I think we should still keep the mantra because it's inarguable that there are an ocean of chumps who think that the idea is the hard part.

[cookiecaper]

Indeed, I think first-mover advantage is generally quite overrated. It helps to have some forerunners soften up the market to make your penetration smoother, and I can't think of many major players who are there simply because they were the first mover.

It can take some time to undo a company's market share if they were first to market, but better products generally win out even if they're comparatively late (as long as they're not too late).

[TomGullen]

If Google went around telling everyone about their Pagerank idea, writing about it online, etc, do you think this would be inconsequential to their success?

[wpietri]

You mean, say, if they published academic papers about it? Like these?

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/ http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/

Of course, PageRank was only one of many relevant innovations. A key one was the open bidding for ads. Another was focusing on a high-quality user experience, which included no banner ads and highly relevant search results ads. Both of which were totally visible to competitors, and only came well after the business was underway.

They have kept two major sorts of innovation secret. One is their aggressive pursuit of very low cost computing infrastructure. The other is the relentless improvements to search quality. PageRank is only a small part of that now. That IP has a ton of value. Not because of some secret Big Idea, but because they have taken a lot of little ideas and relentlessly winnowed them, yielding actual knowledge.