[kirubakaran]

All ideas that were the seeds for multi-billion dollar companies.

They sounded stupid^W bound to fail at first, especially before seeing the implementation / impact:

Better search engine with no sponsored listings, seamless sync and backups, short status updates blasted to your followers, better social network, animated movies that target adults, online book store (without a book store experience), $4 lattes ...

Some ideas that sounded awesome and turned out to be awesome:

Open source and breakfast bars.

To be fair, many considered open source to be blindingly stupid -- "Anyone can edit the source? That would be madness! And why would anyone just contribute hours and hours of their time? Why do you think Microsoft pays their programmers so much."

But then, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -Carl Sagan"

[phaus]

Better Search Engine / Better Social Network - By definition, something that's better than an existing product that's wildly popular isn't stupid. I personally think that social networks are stupid, but by the time Facebook came out, it was obvious that most people didn't.

Seamless Sync and Backups - This is an obviously useful concept, we just needed to wait for the technology to arrive.

Short Status Updates - Agreed.

Animated Movies that Target Adults - Animated movies originally targeted adults. Also, in Japan they have targeted adults for decades. The small group of anime fans in America gradually grew into a billion dollar empire. American companies waited for the business to be lucrative before they started making their own. How is that stupid?

Online Book Store - Might as well say the entire eCommerce industry is stupid. Selling stuff on-line is about as obvious and sensible as it gets.

[kirubakaran]

> "By definition, something that's better than an existing product that's wildly popular isn't stupid", "This is an obviously useful concept, we just needed to wait for the technology to arrive."

In retrospect, yes, absolutely. But when you first hear it, having seen many other attempts, it seems bound to fail or at least don't seem like a billion dollar idea. Hence the "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

[phaus]

It might have been foolish for Facebook if they had started out thinking that they were guaranteed to dethrone Myspace, but that's not how it happened.

The idea of having all of your stuff get automatically backed up and synced with all of your devices seemed like a billion dollar idea the first time someone mentioned it. It just didn't seem feasible until recently. That's not the same as it being a stupid idea.