It reminds you that when your small ideas require proportionately small efforts, you might as well do them and see what happens.
Too many people inappropriately shrug off their smaller thoughts as not worth doing, because they're not going to 'change the world' or some other low-probability outcome.
I noticed this a lot when I tried blogging a couple of summers ago. The articles I thought would be hits bombed, and the stupid ones I wrote just for fun [1] ended up being huge successes.
Inevitably, I just resigned myself to the fact that I don't know what'll be successful, and the only way to find out if something will work is to do it.
[1] http://phillipcohen.net/articles/simcity/ (got like 30,000 hits)
I've noticed the same thing with comments on HN. More often than not, it's the silly one-liner that gets voted up rather than the thoughtful, introspective, and deep comment. I suppose human attention is always the biggest force you have to contend with.
Surely the moral is "it's hard to tell in advance which ideas will be successful, so the more of them you execute, the more success you will have"?
>But if that's true, then why bother taking your time to design good applications? Why strive for excellence when some random gimmick app is just as likely to make money?
You are making the error of assuming something isn't true because you don't like the conclusion.
And indeed, except for whatever personal joy you experience, there is no reason to strive for excellence.
It's discouraging to read things like this, because the implied moral is "any stupid idea you come up with has a chance of making it big". But if that's true, then why bother taking your time to design good applications? Why strive for excellence when some random gimmick app is just as likely to make money?