The Economist has a great article about Evan Williams, the creator of Twitter, and before that the creator of Blogger.com. The article covers a bit of history, Williams' approach to accidental inventions, his success with Blogger and Twitter, and his failure with a project called Odeo.
The story of Odeo is perhaps the most interesting part of the article. Odeo was a product aimed at making podcasts easier to listen to. The problem, according to Williams, was that the problem was so obvious that the big guns were also looking at the same problem. One such big gun was Apple, whose iTunes solution became the industry standard. Williams' lesson from the Odeo experience was that small fish need to work on non-obvious innovations, leaving the obvious ones to the big players.
Whilst I think this is good advice, I all to often meet people who think they have a non-obvious innovation, who actually have an obvious idea.
Really ? so mister Evans is now a millionaire.
Posted by: viagra online | January 18, 2010 at 10:14 PM