Re:The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is...
by jryle70 on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @07:35PM
(#18234230)
Good idea doesn't matter because good ideas are rarely exclusive. If one has a good idea, there is a good chance someone else has also came up the same idea. Thus how to execute that idea becomes critical, including access to capital, talent, market, etc. Amazon was certainly not the first to come up with e-commerce
There are always exception on both ends of the spectrum of course.
Your novel adaption analogy isn't exactly apt. You can't test a movie the way you can with business iteration. There are also no metrics to measure a movie's success the way you can measure revenue, customer retention, user usages, etc.
And this is true in business just as it is in art. You can have a fantastic "good idea", one that is worth billions even if it is executed with only mediocre success. But that doesn't mean you could simply hand that good idea over to someone else and they would succeed with it to the same degree, because there is a very high chance that they just won't "get it". They'll hear the idea and think that you meant something else. Or they'll think some inconsequential aspect of it is the important part while ignoring the truly important part, and so on.
And we see many examples of this in history. We see XEROX looking at a nearly fully executed "good idea" in the form of the Alto and concentrating on temporary, less consequential aspects of it such as the high unit cost of the first generation computers and not seeing the enormous potential (a computer that was so easy to use anybody could use it, and a computer that was so useful that anybody could benefit from having one).