Most successful businesses aren’t based on new ideas. All the big tech companies copied existing businesses, they just did it better.

> All the big tech companies copied existing businesses, they just did it better.

I agree with this regarding their first product. Google wasn't the first ad network, Slack wasn't the first team chat, etc.

Very few of them seem to have ever had a follow-up hit product (whether original or copied). Apple and Microsoft are the only ones I can think of that did it.

Meta and Alphabet have only ever created profitable businesses by acquiring other companies. I'm not even sure anything is profitable at Alphabet other than their ad business (which I would now include with YouTube) and G-Suite.

There are very very few fresh ideas and even those require the vast majority of the project built on someone else's work. Taking something existing and doing it better is what business is all about.

This is true of every tech billionaire. They improved something that already existed.

Rarely if ever do they true novel inventors dominate the market because when the market doesn’t exist they have to create it, and also they’re inventors not necessarily business men.

Wasn't PageRank for instance a pretty novel creation?

But search wasn’t.

Ideas are meaningless, execution is everything.

Having fresh ideas isn't necessary of having a successful business.

His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves.

> His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves.

Acquiring your competitors to kill competition isn't a "good move," it's an obvious strategy that has existed for hundreds of years and is (rightly) illegal.

We unfortunately forgot the lessons of the Gilded Age in this country, and incredibly anti-competitive acquisitions like that have been tolerated on too many occasions.

It's easy to make "good moves" if regulators are ignoring you and you're comfortable with being immoral, as Zuckerberg always has been.

I should clarify that I meant a good move for Facebook/Meta. I'm not commenting on the meaning of those moves outside of that context.

this is cope

Same can be said about Apple.