Techdirt. Stories filed under "execution"

The Lesson Of 3D TV: For 4K TV, The Key Is The Implementation

Timothy Geigner — Wed, 9 Jan 2013 23:58:00 PST

To describe the adoption and sales of 3D TVs as underwhelming would be an understatement. Sales may not be absolutely abysmal, depending on your definition, but this was supposed to be the next thing, and it turns out most consumers don't give two poops about 3D television. (We really love that TechDigest.tv paid us homage with their logo, btw). Despite awful gimmicks, 3D TVs have always felt like a product that was created for a market that manufacturers intended to produce, rather than encourage, through marketing.

Well, if you've been paying attention to the news coming out of CES, one of the new buzz words you may recognize is "4K TV", which offers picture resolutions up to 4 times what was previously available on big screen TVs. But, just as there was with 3D TVs, questions abound about whether or not a large enough market exists for these products.

The word 3D is barely being uttered at CES 2013, but just about all the major TV makers are talking about 4K or ultra-definition HDTV that has four times the resolution of those 1080p sets many of us now own. That's a lot of pixels, which means the picture will be sharper not just when you're sitting several feet away from the set but even if you get up close.

But most us don't get all that close to big screen TVs. The 4K sets being shown at CES are big. Samsung has an 85 inch set, Sony is already selling an 84 inch model. About the smallest set you'll find is 55 inches but even with that size screen, people tend to sit a bit from the screen. I have a 55 inch 1080p set perched several feet in front of my living room couch so I rarely get close enough to my TV to notice any gaps between pixels.

The idea here is that at some point, there are going to be diminishing returns on resolution. Whether 1080p represents that point remains to be seen, but it may be reasonable to think that we've reached a level where more needs to be done to generate interest in higher resolution TVs besides just announcing them and showing the normal demos. They tried that with 3D TVs, along with a few movies that lended themselves well to the 3D experience, and we know that wasn't enough. The real opportunity here is content, specifically good 4K TV content that really takes advantage of all that the technology has to offer. That means content shot with the higher resolutions in mind, including mind-blowing shots that will simply pop with the higher resolution. Sony is the big player here, so you can probably already guess the route they've decided to go.

Taking advantage of the fact that it owns its own movie studios, Sony is trying to jump start content by re-rendering some of its own films into 4K and encouraging short film makers to create content. But it will still be awhile before there is enough native 4K content out there to give viewers a lot of choice of programming.

Sorry, but rehashing old content isn't going to do the trick here, and a lack of early adoption and interest may doom 4K TV to 3D TV's fate. It's all about the implementation. Your new release should show us why we already want the product, not try to generate interest that wasn't natively there. Higher resolutions could be a selling point, were there content that took advantage of it. Given that Sony, as already mentioned, owns its own movie studios, I would have expected them to have timed the product release to something they'd created to take advantage of it. Sadly, it looks like the $20k+ 4K TV devices won't be off to a hot, or useful, start.

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Guy Claims Pinterest Is A Ripoff Of His Failed, Unrelated Site

Mike Masnick — Thu, 3 Jan 2013 12:33:00 PST

By now, everyone should be familiar with the crazy story of the Winklevoss twins, who claimed Mark Zuckerberg "stole" their idea to create Facebook. Over time, other companies have seen similar claims of "copying," usually after someone who was a total flop in the market gets jealous of someone who built a real company. The latest example is Pinterest, which has now been accused of "stealing" the idea through a path so convoluted it may take a map to work out the details.

Here's the short version, as far as I can tell, and unless there are more details, it seems likely that this is going to get laughed out of court (hopefully with sanctions for filing an obviously bogus lawsuit). Basically, a guy (Theodore Schroeder) started a site you never heard of (called RendezVoo) in which people could "share their locations" (sounds like they should be suing FourSquare, not Pinterest). That site wasn't getting much traction, but they planned a version two, where people could "share opinions, views, items and tastes on a variety of subjects" like, well, pretty much any other site on the internet. This site included "boards" that people could post stuff too and also had "infinite scrolling" when an alpha was released in August of 2006.

Months later, Schroeder met Ben Cohen, an investor in startups in NYC, who apparently told them he didn't understand what they were trying to do with RendezVoo, but brainstormed up a totally unrelated and different concept, whereby startups could "launch" new products via a sort of wire service. Schroeder and his other partners (who continued to work day jobs) completely dumped their RendezVoo plans and worked out something new, called Skoopwire (originally Scoopwire, until they realized someone else had the domain). With this plan in hand, they signed up Cohen to be a partner, taking on the role of Chairman (and promising to put in a little bit of money). Over the course of a few months, not much appeared to happen, and after Cohen (quite reasonably) pointed out that it was silly for the other partners in the project to still be working day jobs rather than focusing on the project, it went dormant.

Months later, Cohen apparently met the founders of Pinterest and became their first investor. At the time, they were still figuring out what their product would be. This is where Schroeder and his lawyers take a massive logic leap in claiming that Cohen "stole" all of Schroeder's ideas and gave them to Pinterest's founders. This is based on... almost nothing of substance. The claims are basically that Pinterest has "infinite scrolling," that it has "boards" and that they used a "pink and purple color scheme to attract female users." Of course, none of that is even remotely "protectable." Those are basic ideas that are found all over the place.

Hell, a quick Google search shows that "infinite scroll" first showed up well over a year earlier, and at nearly the same exact time as Schroeder launched the new version of RendezVoo with infinite scroll, Microsoft's Live.com image search had the feature. In other words, "infinite scroll" -- especially for images -- was already popping up in a variety of places. It's ridiculous to think that Cohen -- who, again, insisted he didn't understand RendezVoo and told the team to build an entirely different product -- "stole" the idea and sat on it for a year and a half to give to some other entrepreneurs who somehow failed to see a ton of other sites using infinite scroll by that point. Similarly the idea of organizing a web page as a "board" was hardly new at this time, and let's not even bother discussing the idea of making a site "pink and purple."

Also, like pretty much every similar claim we've seen in the past, it involves someone completely overvaluing the idea and ignoring that it's the execution, not the idea, that matters in innovation. Pinterest isn't a success because of "boards" or "infinite scrolling" or "purple and pink" but because it built a great service that people like -- something Schroeder didn't do. Also, note that tons of Pinterest clones have popped up in the wake of Pinterest's success, but you don't see Pinterest suing, rather continuing to build out their product.

The whole thing seems like sour grapes from a failed entrepreneur because someone else succeeded with a totally different idea, and he saw a weak connection to use as the basis of a lawsuit.

Randomly, the AllThingsD article above notes one other oddity: Schroeder's lawyers insist that he's a "self-taught computer genius," but there aren't any records of him online. ATD's Liz Gannes couldn't find any trace of him on the web, which seems odd for someone who claims to be an internet entrepreneur and knowledgeable about what's new in social networking.

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'Almost Anybody Can Have An Idea' -- Linus Torvalds

Glyn Moody — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:57:00 PDT

A constant theme here on Techdirt is that it's not the idea that's crucial, but the execution. Here's someone who seems to agree:

People like to idolize the "ideas" and "inspiration", but in the end, almost anybody can have an idea. Getting things actually done is where people stumble.

The person speaking those words -- Linus Torvalds -- certainly hasn't stumbled much. In January 1992, only about 100 people in the world were using his Linux kernel, which he had written as a 21-year-old student in his Helsinki bedroom, on a PC with 4MB of RAM. Twenty years later, Linux sits at the heart of some 300 million Android devices, with 850,000 more being added every day, and runs 91% of the world's top 500 supercomputing systems.

The idea of writing a kernel for Richard Stallman's GNU operating system was obvious to everyone -- it was the key piece still missing. In fact, a year before Torvalds started Linux, Stallman himself had begun working on a version called the Hurd, along with a few fellow coders of his Free Software Foundation.

Despite this impeccable pedigree, the Hurd is being used today by only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions running Linux -- further evidence that it's really not the idea, but the execution that counts.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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Groupon... And The Difference Between Idea & Execution

Mike Masnick — Fri, 6 May 2011 18:37:06 PDT

About a month ago, the folks at Planet Money did a nice podcast on the economics of Groupon. There's no doubt that there's a bit of a "coupon" bubble going on these days, with tons of companies crowding into the space, and (as the Podcast notes) a bunch of ex-Wall St. types jumping into the space with talk of creating derivatives on coupons/deals. At the same time, plenty of people have mocked Groupon and insisted that its model isn't sustainable and others can easily come in and kill Groupon. In fact, some of the Wall St. guys who stayed on Wall St. are saying that Groupon's value shouldn't be that high because anyone with a phone can copy them.

Lots of people are discussing Felix Salmon's excellent analysis of the economics of Groupon, which is really more about the fact that Groupon has dominated the space because it executes well. That is, it's not about the idea, it's about the execution. The fact that it has remained dominant despite so many copycats shows that just copying isn't enough. This doesn't mean that Groupon will always be the best at executing (in fact, I doubt it will be). But it's not so simple as just coming in and copying.

This is an issue that comes up all the time when we talk about business and intellectual property. People who haven't built up businesses like this assume that all you need is the idea -- and if an idea can be copied, then the company can't succeed. But that ignores just how important the execution element is. Salmon talks about how hard Groupon works to make sure its advertisers are happy with the results, to a level beyond most of its competitors. However, I think there's another element of Groupon's execution that hasn't received nearly enough attention: how enjoyable it makes the whole thing for consumers.

Groupon employs a bunch of writers who work hard to make sure all of the deals are compelling, enjoyable and fun. It always amazes me how much people underestimate the value of the quality of the writing in Groupon's offers. However, where it really struck me was a few months back, when I was researching some newer competitors to Groupon -- in particular, newspapers that were offering deals directly to compete with Groupon. In theory, newspapers should be able to absolutely destroy Groupon. If you're just standing on the mountain looking down, and seeing who has the advantages here, it's clearly the newspapers. Newspapers already rely on local advertising and deals, and have established long-term relationships in the market. On top of that, newspapers employ a ton of (mostly) high quality writers as well, so they should be able to create similarly compelling content.

And yet, when I was looking at various newspaper Groupon clones, what struck me was how boring and dull their offers were. Even if the deals themselves were comparable (and they often weren't), they just weren't that interesting or compelling to read. And that's because the newspapers -- like the Wall St. analyst above -- are engaging in cargo cult copying, where they think that all that matters is copying the superficial idea -- while missing the secret sauce that goes into the less obvious execution.

As a final aside, the quality of Groupon's content highlights another key point that we've raised many times before: how "infinite goods" like content make scarce goods more valuable. In this case, the "content" created by Groupon's writers (and, yes, this is also an example of how advertising is content) is valuable. But no one's selling the "content." What Groupon is doing is using that good content to make the scarcity of the deals more valuable, making more people willing to buy them.

In the end, I will admit that I have my doubts about the overall sustainability of Groupon itself, but it's not because "the idea" is easily copyable. I'm just not convinced that Groupon can continue to execute as well, and some aspects of what it's offering have some elements of a fad written all over them. But claiming that the company is overvalued because the "idea" is too easy makes little sense.

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Felix Dennis: Ideas Without Execution Are Nothing

Mike Masnick — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:05:36 PDT

Well this is getting a little repetitive, but it's always nice to add another voice to the (growing) crowd of people, who recognize that execution is much more important than the idea. We've discussed this many times and have pointed out people, such as Scott Adams, who have made similar points. The latest such example comes to us courtesy of the Capitalist Lion Tamer, who highlights a brief excerpt from Maxim and The Week creator Felix Dennis' new book, in which he makes the identical point about ideas and execution. He notes that an idea is not enough. It may be important, but ideas are more "like Nike sports shoes," in that they can be a tool that can be used by someone to accomplish great things, but in the end it's the actual execution that matters:

I have lost count of the number of men and women who have approached me with their “great idea,” as if this, in and of itself, was their passport to instant wealth. The idea is not a passport. At most, it is the means of obtaining one. In some instances, a fixation on a great idea can prove hazardous, distracting your attention from the perils and pitfalls you will inevitably encounter on the narrow road.

If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. They do not have to be your ideas — execution is all. When confronted with a great idea, your reaction should be to scrupulously analyze its commercial potential in the context of your own ability to transform that potential into triumph.

Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.

Doesn't it seem odd that so many people (and very, very successful people at that) recognize this basic concept... and yet our entire public policy around innovation focuses solely on rewarding the idea, at the expense of the execution?

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Woman Who Claimed Ownership Of 'Biggest Loser' Idea Declared A Loser By The Courts

Mike Masnick — Tue, 1 Mar 2011 20:33:12 PST

It seems that every time there's a really successful book, movie or TV show that comes along, someone else comes along and claims that it was really their idea, and demands cash for it. Of course, in almost every one of these cases, they don't seem to realize that lots of people had the same idea, and there's a huge difference between idea and execution. Instead, they assume that only they could have had the idea, and anything similar -- which involved actual successful execution -- must owe them money. Thankfully, the courts are generally pretty good about tossing these cases out. The latest involves someone who claims she came up with the idea for the reality TV show The Biggest Loser which she called Phat Farm. The legal process hasn't been kind to her. One court pointed out that she never actually registered for a copyright on the Phat Farm treatment, and now another court has noted that there really aren't that many similarities between the ideas. Another case dismissed.

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Multiple Lawsuits From Multiple People Who All Say They Came Up With Kung Fu Panda

Mike Masnick — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 06:24:48 PST

We'd heard a while back a guy named Terence Dunn who had sued Dreamworks, claiming that he had come up with the concept of "Kung Fu Panda," which Dreamworks made into a massively successful film. We hadn't written about it at the time, because for pretty much every big successful film or book, someone comes out of the woodwork to claim some sort of ownership stake. However, now we've got a second such lawsuit. THREsq reports on a guy named Jayme Gordon, who actually seems to have a somewhat stronger claim, in that he actually created a project, registered with the US Copyright Office, called "Kung Fu Panda Power" whose characters have some similarities to the movie's characters. Assuming the drawings in that article are accurate, it would seem that he has a much stronger claim that the usual "that movie took my idea!" claim.

Still, there are two things to consider. Is the idea of a Panda that does Kung Fu really so original? After all, there seem to be multiple people who came up with it, and it seems like a pretty straightforward thought process. As a commenter on the linked article above notes:

Combining Kung Fu and a Panda is not a terribly difficult idea to come up with. You say you want a Kung Fu movie, but with animals? Okay, where does Kung Fu come from? China? Oh, okay. Well, what kinda animals live in China? Well, there's the Panda, of course. Bingo. Let's make it.

And, the second point is one we've pointed out before: there's a big difference between an idea and executing on the idea. Just having a general idea that many others might have as well shouldn't give you the right to step in and collect some of the profits from those who actually took the risk and executed successfully on the idea.

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Winklevoss Twins Still Trying To Get More Of Facebook

Mike Masnick — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:14:58 PST

There have been a whole series of claims from others that they had the "original idea" for Facebook, but as we've explained over and over again, the idea part was pretty meaningless. There were plenty of other, competing social networks at the time Facebook was founded. What made Facebook a success was not the original idea, but how the company executed and changed (quite a lot) over time, adapting to the market. And, yet, the lawsuits continue. The most famous, of course, was the one filed by the Winklevoss twins, which is at the heart of the recent fictionalized movie about Facebook. As we covered here, the twins sued, claiming that Zuckerberg took the idea from them and their company ConnectU. Over the years, more evidence has come out that suggests Zuckerberg may have been kind of slimey in dealing with the twins, but it still didn't suggest that the twins actually deserved any part of Facebook. Even so, in 2008 (as is covered in the movie), the company settled the lawsuit, and dumped stock worth tens of millions on the twins... for not doing anything.

Given all that, we were amazed later that year when the twins sought to back out of the settlement, in what appears to be a clear case of "settlers' remorse." Joe Mullin has the latest on the twins' attempt to go through this whole thing all over again, and notes how ridiculous the whole situation is:

What makes CU's drawn-out litigation all the more remarkable is that Facebook has to be one of the most patently "unstealable" ideas out there. Facebook wasn't the first internet social network and, at the time of the suit, wasn't profoundly different than those that came before it. Facebook's success isn't due to the idea of a social network, but the skillful execution of that idea--combined, of course, with some hard work and some very lucky timing.

As Mullin points out, however, these kinds of cases have increased in recent years, as the culture and legal framework we've created, that overvalues ideas and undervalues execution, leads people to think that just because they had an idea -- even if they had nothing to do with the execution -- they deserve a cut from those who did execute. While we've already posted this before, now seems like a perfect time to repost the recent recent xkcd comic on this concept:

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Arianna Huffington Sued For 'Stealing' The Idea For The Huffington Post

Mike Masnick — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:38:55 PST

Apparently two political consultants, Peter Daou and James Boyce, thought they had a deal back in 2004 to help create a blogging site with Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer -- and they're now suing both of them for "idea misappropriation" over the Huffington Post. The whole filing is quite a read: Of course, you can't own an idea, so it's a bit silly to claim otherwise. There's also a breach of contract claim, which also seems like a huge stretch. While it is possible to have a verbal contract, from the filings, it's going to be very difficult for Daou and Boyce to prove that there was any official verbal contract at work here. It sounded like early stages of planning, before Huffington and Lerer decided to go in their own direction.

Also quite damning is the fact that the lawsuit is being filed more than 5 years after the events took place. Daou and Boyce try to explain this away by claiming that a public legal fight would hurt their ability to get other work, which doesn't really make much sense. On top of that Daou and Boyce have been regular contributors to The Huffington Post. In the lawsuit, they suggest that they still wanted it to be a success and hoped that Huffington and Lerer would make things right. It's difficult to see this court case getting very far, but it may scare people off from having any conversations with Daou or Boyce about potentially working together on any kind of project, as it seems they might sue you in the future if you don't automatically cut them in on it if you decide to go off and do it on your own.

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The Difference Between Ideas And Execution -- And What's Missing From 'The Social Network'

Mike Masnick — Tue, 5 Oct 2010 16:34:07 PDT

By pretty much all accounts, The Social Network sounds like a fantastic movie (which is what you'd expect from Aaron Sorkin). At this point, it's been made clear a hundred times over that it's a work of fiction, rather loosely based on the truth, rather than an accurate depiction of what actually happened in Facebook's early days. However, Larry Lessig does an excellent job highlighting why, even as it's a great movie, it's dangerously misleading about how innovation works. The key point, as we've made in the past, Facebook -- the idea -- wasn't anything special. There were tons of social networks out there. What made it special was the execution, which Facebook did like no one else has done before or since.

Except, as Lessig notes, in the movie, a totally different portrait is painted. One where execution is meaningless, and only ideas and lawyers seem to matter:

In Sorkin's world--which is to say Hollywood, where lawyers attempt to control every last scrap of culture--this framing makes sense. But as I watched this film, as a law professor, and someone who has tried as best I can to understand the new world now living in Silicon Valley, the only people that I felt embarrassed for were the lawyers. The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because "our idea was stolen!") of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can't know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other "property"? Absolutely not--the code for Facebook was his, and the "idea" of a social network is not a patent. It wasn't justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.

It's too bad, if not surprising, that the film decides to celebrate this tax on innovation and creativity as if it makes sense.

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Ideas vs. Execution Shows Why Competition Is A Good Thing

Mike Masnick — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:47:41 PDT

I was recently talking with a group of folks who were discussing an idea for a new product, which I thought was pretty compelling. However, one of the concerns raised by someone in the group was the fact that there seemed to be a few other companies already in that space, and while they weren't doing the exact same thing, there was concern that this product wouldn't be considered "new." This is an issue that comes up a lot, and one that we recently talked about in suggesting that companies need to get over the wasteful and inefficient view that everything they do has to be wholly invented from scratch. Along those lines Chris Dixon has an excellent post, which he titles: "competition is overrated," but I think he really means that fear of competition is overrated. He notes that competition in a market often means you're on the right track:

Almost every good idea has already been built. Sometimes new ideas are just ahead of their time. There were probably 50 companies that tried to do viral video sharing before YouTube. Before 2005, when YouTube was founded, relatively few users had broadband and video cameras. YouTube also took advantage of the latest version of Flash that could play videos seamlessly.

Similarly, just because there are so many companies in a market, it doesn't mean any of them are really executing well:

Other times existing companies simply didn't execute well. Google and Facebook launched long after their competitors, but executed incredibly well and focused on the right things. When Google launched, other search engines like Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos were focused on becoming multipurpose "portals" and had de-prioritized search (Yahoo even outsourced their search technology).

In fact, this succinctly reiterates a whole bunch of the points that we've discussed repeatedly over time. First, there's a big difference between ideas and execution. Just because others are in the market (and even well established), it doesn't mean you can't do a better job. It also highlights the difference between invention and innovation, where invention is just coming up with something new, but innovation is really bringing it to market successfully. Facebook and Google are both great examples of innovative companies who didn't really "invent" their initial markets.

And Dixon then brings it back to the value of imitating, on which there's now an excellent book out (which I'm still only partially through) called Copycats. Dixon points out that in being a "follower" initially, you can build off of their work:

The fact that other entrepreneurs thought the idea was good enough to build can be a positive signal. They probably went through some kind of vetting process like talking to target users and doing some market research. By launching later, you can piggyback off the work they've already done.

On top of that, I would argue that you can also avoid some of the mistakes that they make.

In the end, he points out that worrying about competitors is really usually the least of your issues as a startup:

Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding -- not other startups. For web startups this means you should worry about users simply not coming to your site, or when they do come, hitting the BACK button.

Consider that the startup equivalent of the messages told to tons of content creators these days: that obscurity is a much bigger threat than "piracy." In the same way that "piracy" is really just "competition," those too focused on that sort of competition will often miss the more important fact that you need to find actual, real users and customers who are going to stick around.

One other point on all of this: when you limit a market to just one player (via monopolies like patents), you can actually lose out. You don't get those other players in the market that you yourself can piggyback off of as well, and there's less incentive to get the formula right. Competition is a good thing in how it drives a market, but if you're working in a startup, you shouldn't necessarily be so worried about it directly.

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Scott Adams: Ideas vs. Execution

Mike Masnick — Mon, 7 Jun 2010 13:37:00 PDT

For many years, we've pointed out over and over and over and over and over again, that ideas are easy, whereas execution is hard. People get way too hung up on ideas, but lots of people have ideas, and no two people (or groups of people) are likely to execute in the same way. And, for anyone who's ever built up a success, you quickly learn that execution is everything. The initial ideas are usually completely meaningless. Apparently Scott Adams is thinking the same way. Andrew F was the first of a whole bunch of you to have sent in his recent blog post on the "value of ideas" which highlights this point, specifically with regards to people complaining about the idea of a Dilbert movie:

Movies are good or bad because of execution, not concept. Even outside of the movie realm, ideas generally have no economic value whatsoever, except in rare cases such as when a patent is issued. And even in those cases it's the patent law that creates the value, not the ideas.

From there, he goes on to point to a whole series of huge success stories... all of which probably sound like terrible ideas on paper:

I've long been fascinated by the common human illusion that ideas can be sorted into good and bad, when all experience shows this not to be the case. We could play the game all day long where I describe a simply terrible idea and then tell you about the people who got rich implementing it just right. Let's try a few...

How about a comic strip that is literally a bunch of stick figures? It will be called XKCD and have no discernable characters. Done! It's the most viewed comic on the Internet.

How about a movie about two gay cowboys? Done! Academy Award!

How about a comedic TV show about a Nazi concentration camp? Done! It was called Hogan's Heroes and was a hit in its time.

How about a Broadway musical about a bunch of frickin' cats? Done!

You'd be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn't succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn't fail if the execution were left to morons.

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

Separately, I should note that it's pretty cool to see Adams highlighting the massive success of XKCD. Last week, when we had posted about another Scott Adams item, one of our regular critics insisted in the comments that Adams was only successful because of newspapers, and that no new comic strips could be successful or make money without the aid of an industry like newspapers. Others in the comments quickly pointed to Penny Arcade and XKCD -- both of which have been huge success stories. Honestly, I didn't realize that XKCD was "the most viewed comic on the internet," but as Adams has been considering how the market is changing, it's great that he's paying attention to what folks like Randall are doing, and recognizing that it's been such a huge success.

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Ideas Into Execution: Giving Away An Idea To Make It Happen

Mike Masnick — Fri, 9 Apr 2010 19:38:00 PDT

We spend a lot of time talking about innovation and ideas. Part of that discussion often turns to patents, and questions of whether it is better to "protect" or "hoard" your ideas, or to focus on sharing them. Patents live in this nebulous world between the two, where you partially (sort of) "give away" the idea, in exchange for the right to protect it. This seems counterintuitive when you think about it. Plenty of research has shown that people invent and innovate more often because they want what they're inventing themselves -- not because they want some sort of monopoly right over it. Other research has shown how innovation (rather than invention) is really an ongoing process, that often involves building on various ideas. For years, we've discussed how the "idea" is quite often overvalued, while the execution is undervalued. Lots of people have ideas. How you execute on them is where the real innovation occurs.

I was thinking about all of this after hearing of the launch of a new service called Mixtape For You, which let's you create a limited time mixtape, which only a single person (who you email) can download. What does this have to do with ideas, execution and innovation? Well, let's go back a bit... and follow this (somewhat convoluted, but fun) trail:

On Memorial Day weekend in 2009, at the annual Sasquatch Music Festival, some shirtless dude started dancing, and someone else started filming him with a cameraphone. Then someone else started dancing with the shirtless dude. Then someone else. Then a few more people. Then a bunch more. Then pretty much everyone. The guy who filmed it put the video up on YouTube, where it went viral (nearly 3 million views at this point). I remember seeing it passed around as a video that "just makes you smile." And it does.
As the video became popular, some started to think about it a bit more, and all around smart guy, Derek Sivers, wrote up a nice little blog post in June, analyzing the sociological aspects of the video.
That discussion turned into an absolutely wonderful 3 minute TED Talk, given in February of this year, that Sivers gave, using the video as a way to explain and demonstrate the importance of "first followers" in creating a true "movement."
That talk got a ton of attention, with lots of people telling Sivers that he should turn the whole "first follower" meme into a book or something like that. Sivers, however, said he wasn't that interested in doing much with the concept and decided, in the very nature of the "first follower" to give away the idea and embrace anyone else who wanted to take the idea and run with it:
If this "First Follower" idea inspires you to elaborate on it, please do. Feel free to write a hit book about it, tour the corporate speaking circuit talking about it, or anything else. I won't.

You don't have to ask my permission, pay me, or even credit me.

I've been very lucky with lots of opportunities. This one's all yours.
Another all around smart guy, Andrew Dubber, picked up on the idea and considered doing exactly as Sivers suggested above, and writing a book based on this concept. But, after sleeping on it, he decided to innovate and execute in a slightly different way. Instead of taking the "first follower" idea and preaching it, Dubber wanted to be a first follower of Siver's other concept: giving away ideas. He decided that he would give away 30 ideas in 30 days -- just like Sivers "gave away" his idea.
Starting March 3rd, Dubber did exactly that, giving away an idea a day.
On March 16th (day 14), Dubber's idea give away, was called I Made A Tape, and was based on the idea that, back in the old days, when people made mixtapes, they were usually for someone specifically. And while there are a bunch of "mixtape" services out there these days (though the RIAA likes to shut them down every so often), Dubber thought it would be cool to create one that allowed someone to be more personal:
So that's why my idea is an online music sharing site -- but one that can only be shared with one person. You craft a "tape" with a single person in mind, and then that mix is sent to that person with a unique URL that only they can access.

They can download or stream the mixtape, and it comes with the liner notes that you've written.
And then... on April 6th, some other guy, Ray Kuyvenhoven launched MixTapeForYou.com, based very much on Dubber's idea from just a few weeks earlier.

I'd been following the whole chain of events from the very beginning, but what struck me about it, and what caused me to write this post was when I read Dubber's followup post, gleefully talking about how cool it was that Kuyvenhoven actually executed on his idea, this one line stood out:

I invented something, and it came true because I said it out loud.

That's a really powerful statement when you think about it. And, of course, it goes way beyond that. Just look back at the trail of things that happened that resulted in this particular offering coming about -- how many of them were disconnected and simply shared. Yet, we keep hearing people talk about the need to "protect" an idea? Innovation doesn't come out of protection. It comes out of building on the ideas of others and sharing and others taking a different view on it and finally someone executing, not because they want a patent, but because they want the product.

And to tie this all together, Sivers (who kicked off a lot of the chain of explosions above) has also pointed out himself that it's the execution that matters, and ideas, by themselves, are "worth nothing unless executed."

But think about all this in context, and you realize that it was the openness and sharing of ideas that resulted in execution. It happened by building on different ideas -- not "copying," but innovating. And, it's not just this one idea. Remember, Dubber put forth 30 ideas, and others have been doing the same, building on those ideas themselves. In fact, some have committed to delivering on other ideas that Dubber put forth as well.

Now, before people get upset and say "well that's great, but it doesn't mean patents aren't useful," you're right. I'm not saying that any of this negates the need for patents (there are other reasons for that), but I found it to be such a great example of how ideas travel and morph and lead to eventual execution, totally separate from focusing on the need for protection, that it felt worth sharing. And hopefully, someone else might share it, build on it and do something different and innovative with this idea themselves.

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It's The Execution That Matters, Not The Idea

Mike Masnick — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:40:00 PST

For years we've tried to explain the difference between ideas and execution, and how lots of people have ideas (in fact, many have the same ideas entirely independently), but without good execution, those ideas aren't really worth much at all. This point comes up a lot in the debates we have over the patent system -- with patent system supporters often overvaluing the idea part, and grossly underestimating the importance of execution. Often this is because they've never built a real business, and don't realize how little an initial idea plays into the final product. The two are often oceans apart. But stopping others from executing well (or forcing them to fork over a ton of money) just because they executed well where you did not? That doesn't seem like encouraging innovation or promoting progress at all.

DSchneider points us to an excellent recent Jeff Attwood post about the differences between the idea and the execution. It's well worth reading as it covers a bunch of different things, including a common refrain made against those who successfully execute: that they were only able to do so because they were "well-connected." As he notes, being well connected may get you an initial head start, but if you can't execute well, no one will come back. The idea, alone, is almost meaningless.

Attwood highlights this by pointing to a recent letter to a mailing list from one of the guys who started a crowdfunding operation called Fundable a while back, which failed miserably (and very spectacularly in public, with an open letter posted to its website laying out all the dirty laundry). There were all sorts of problems with the execution, which the guy even admits:

Yes, Fundable had some technical and customer service problems. That's because we had no money to revise it. I had plans to scrap the entire CMS and start from scratch with a new design. We were just so burned out that motivation was hard to come by. What was the point if we weren't making enough money to live on after 4 years?

The "technical and customer service problems" underplayed how significant some of those problems were. And yet... now that other crowdfunding platforms are getting attention, such as Kickstarter, this guy is crazy upset that they "stole his idea."

I feel that this story is important to tell you because Kickstarter.com copied us. I tried for 4 years to get people to take Fundable seriously, traveling across the country, even giving a presentation to FBFund, Facebook's fund to stimulate development of new apps. It was a series of rejections for 4 years. I really felt that I presented myself professionally in every business situation and I dressed appropriately and practiced my presentations. That was not enough. The idiots wanted us to show them charts with massive profits and widespread public acceptance so that they didn't have to take any risks....

I cannot tell you how painful it is to watch 5 assholes take your idea and run with it and not even give you credit. I hate all 5 of them for that. If I see them, I may punch each one of them in the face. If you have never started your own company and then had someone else steal the credit for what you worked hard to develop, you don't understand.

Now, I have started my own company, and I've had lots of other people either come up with the same idea separately, or even blatantly decide to do something similar to various aspects of our business. So I do know how it feels. And, certainly when you first hear about it, it may be annoying, but it's really just a challenge. I'll be honest, there are times when others have done a better job executing on ideas than I have in the past, and in the end you either compete, or you tip your hat and move on. Competition breeds innovation and better execution since you know you need to do more. And that means not screwing up your technology and customer service and not lashing out and blaming others when someone else executes better.

And, the thing is, given what we write about, and all the business model examples we've see over the years, we're pretty damn familiar with many of the players in the whole "crowdfunding space." There have been lots of players who have come and gone, and there are at least a dozen players in the space today. And it's not because they all "took" the idea from this guy, but because lots of people recognized that it's an idea that makes sense. Kickstarter is certainly getting a ton of press these days, but that's mostly because of some top notch execution on its part.

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Why Losers Litigate: It's Profitable!

Mike Masnick — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:11:30 PST

Economics is all about incentives -- and when you create incentives for bad activity, you can rest assured that you're going to get more bad activity. This has become especially troubling with respect to the belief that (a) ideas are more important than execution and (b) that you can "own" ideas. You cannot own ideas -- and even though, technically, intellectual property isn't supposed to let you own ideas, in many cases it's created either scenarios where that is what's happened -- or where enough people believe it's true that you can insist that ideas aren't ownable, but you'll still have a costly legal bill to pay.

So what does that have to do with incentives?

Well, we keep seeing scenarios where winners innovate, but losers litigate. That's because the market "losers" claim that they had the "idea" that allowed the winners to innovate and succeed in the market. But, of course, that overvalues the idea and greatly undervalues the actual execution. Anyone who's built a successful business recognizes that it's the process and execution that leads to success -- not the idea. But, with courts all too often rewarding the losers, it's simply too lucrative for marketplace losers not to sue.

In one such case, it seemed absolutely ridiculous that the founders of a competing social network, ConnectU that had briefly employed Mark Zuckerberg before he founded Facebook was suing him for "stealing" their idea. ConnectU had been a massive failure in the marketplace, while obviously Facebook has been much more successful. But, of course, the "idea" part was rather meaningless. There were already a bunch of similar social networks out there when both ConnectU and Facebook were getting started. Yet, rather than avoid a drawn out legal battle, Facebook eventually just agreed to settle -- though with the demands that the terms of the settlement remain confidential.

That worked... briefly. It turns out that the lawyers for ConnectU couldn't resist bragging, and accidentally advertised that they had won $65 million from Facebook. The number is not really accurate -- as the settlement was a mixture of cash and equity (whose value is really anybody's guess). However, it does show you why losers litigate so often. Imagine being handed millions for failing in the marketplace? Why wouldn't you litigate? But, if you believe in basic free market capitalism, you should recognize how this is rewarding exactly the wrong behavior. It punishes those who best served the market, and rewards those who couldn't serve the market.

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OLPC Discovers Economic Reality; Cuts Staff

Mike Masnick — Thu, 8 Jan 2009 05:50:00 PST

We've certainly been somewhat harsh on Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC program in the past -- not because we don't like the idea of helping underprivileged kids building technology skills, but because of the way Negroponte has run the project from the beginning. He's acted as if he were the only one who should be working towards that goal and any competition was seen as a betrayal. Also, he took a very top down Negroponte-knows-best approach to building the laptop, which has led to significant problems within the team and with the product not living up to expectations -- showing once again that ideas are easy, it's the execution that's difficult, and if you limit the execution to just one company, you're cutting off a lot of the opportunity.

So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that OLPC is now cutting its workforce in half, and slashing salaries for remaining employees. Negroponte blames the economy, but that seems like an especially weak excuse, given just how strongly small, inexpensive mini-laptops (netbooks) are selling these days. Clearly, there's tremendous demand out there for super cheap, small laptops. The problem is that Negroponte decided from the beginning that his product was only for kids in developing countries, and left a massive market underserved (the rather weak give one, get one program was hardly serving the market).

But, again, the point is clear: the overall market is doing a rather amazing job serving the market. They're providing all sorts of very cheap mini laptops at price points even below what the OLPC is going for. No, most netbooks don't have some of the bells and whistles of the OLPC that help it survive a rough environment, but it seems rather likely that used netbooks and newer cheaper netbooks will find their way into developing countries soon enough as well -- just as second hand mobile phones have made it. So, in the end, Negroponte's original vision may get served, but it will get served by the market and competition, rather than his own grand master plan.

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Will Nicholas Negroponte Ever Understand That Competition Isn't About Killing OLPC?

Mike Masnick — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:48:00 PDT

We've never quite understood Nicholas Negroponte's position when it comes to the $100 Laptop/OLPC/XO (whatever it's called these days). While the idea behind creating a super cheap, super durable useful computer for children in developing nations is good, Negroponte has always approached the idea as one where only he should be allowed to see that vision through. When other companies decided it might be a good idea and wanted to target that market themselves, Negroponte flipped out and started attacking them for trying to undermine his project.

Sorry, Nicholas, but competition isn't undermining.

In fact, competition is generally what drives all parties to be better at what they do, in order to fend off the competition. Yet, somehow, the UK's Times Online has bought into Negroponte's side of the story and written up an article bashing Microsoft and Intel for trying to "kill" the OLPC. The article is riddled with factual errors and opinion substituting as fact, but the worst is in the central point of the article. The author mistakes companies all aiming for the same market as a nefarious attempt to "kill off" Negroponte's pet project -- as if he has some universal right to the market that no one else can attempt to enter. It also brushes over some simple facts, like the one where many countries have looked at the OLPC and realized it doesn't really serve their needs just yet. That, if anything, should be even more reason why competition is necessary. It helps create better products that actually serve the needs of people in those markets, rather than just what Negroponte decides they must want in his top-down manner.

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OLPC Learning That Ideas Are Easy, Execution Is Hard

Timothy Lee — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:48:00 PDT

Business Week has an in-depth write-up about the One Laptop Per Child project's first deployments in developing countries. The original plan called for building 150 million laptops by the end of 2008; it now looks like they'll be lucky to ship a million before the end of the year. It appears that a big part of the problem is that Nicholas Negroponte and his team underestimated the support requirements for the laptops. Getting laptops into the hands of poor children is good, but it's a lot better if the laptops come with training for teachers and support personnel on how to use them effectively. OLPC may have hoped to build a laptop that was so easy to use that little support was required, but the countries writing the checks don't appear to have bought the argument. Nigeria, for example, backed out of a previous commitment to buy a million laptops from OLPC, opting for Intel's Classmate PC instead. Intel's superior support was cited as the major reason for the decision.

This highlights what was so ridiculous about Negroponte's demand that other companies stop offering competing low-cost laptops. Negroponte deserves credit for pioneering the concept of producing cheap laptops for poor children, but coming up with the idea is, relatively speaking, the easy part. What's far more difficult is the execution. Technical wizardry is an important part of that, to be sure, but probably even more important are the logistical details: keeping the project on time and under budget and ensuring that the shipping project has adequate support. There are a million ways for things to go wrong, which is why it's a good to have a bunch of different organizations working on the problem in parallel. By his own admission, Negroponte is more a visionary than a strong manager, which is precisely why he should have welcomed the entry of a company with Intel's logistical prowess into the market. It may not be as personally satisfying for him to have a for-profit company finish the job he started, but if the goal is to help poor children, then he should be happy to see them being offered more options.

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When Ideas Are Easy And Execution Is Hard... It Makes Sense To Share Your Ideas

Mike Masnick — Wed, 4 Jun 2008 12:56:00 PDT

We've been hitting on the theme that ideas are easy, while execution is hard for a while now -- and a friend pointed me to a worthwhile blog post by Brad Burnham, an experienced venture capitalist, now a partner with Union Square Ventures. Burnham muses that the successful entrepreneurs he's backed tended to be the ones who were the most open about their ideas, not just with him, but with everyone. What it really comes back to is this idea that ideas are easy and execution is difficult. The entrepreneur who is living and breathing the idea (and has probably already tested out a bunch of different related ideas) is likely to gain a lot more from the conversation with an outsider (even a potential competitor) than that other person is going to gain from talking to the entrepreneur. While there is an old-school mentality that you need to keep things secret, history has shown that that tends not to be the best way to grow a successful business. When you do that, you end up making all sorts of mistakes that a few conversations may have helped you avoid.

An interesting parallel to this debate is the discussion we had last year about noncompetes. What the research there has shown is that a big part of the reason for Silicon Valley's success is the fact that noncompete agreements are unenforceable in California. What happened, then, was much more job-hopping, and a much faster dispersion not just of ideas, but of problem solving and innovation across the industry. In AnnaLee Saxenian's book that kicked off this debate, she noted that Silicon Valley culture was such that many engineers here spent plenty of time discussing their biggest challenges with direct competitors, just to get better ideas -- believing that solving the big problems would work out better in the end for everyone, and that holding back ideas didn't solve anything. Amusingly, in that case, Burnham's partner at Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson, took the other side: favoring noncompetes (though, I get the feeling Wilson's changing his mind as the evidence has been presented).

This also, by the way, goes completely against the theory (chiefly propagated by supporters of a stronger patent system) that without patents, the world would devolve into an innovation-free zone where trade secrecy ruled. That seems unlikely to happen, based on exactly what Burnham and others have noticed. Keeping an idea secret not only is unlikely to be effective, it can often stifle the necessary development. Thus, it will be the companies that are more open and free with their ideas that dominate the market. The key reason why, of course, goes back to what we talked about at the beginning. Ideas are certainly important, but it's execution that's the key to success -- and being more free in sharing your ideas will often help you execute better.

Burnham also asks about whether or not it's possible to "model" this openness -- and I think it is. In fact, in many ways it matches the infinite goods economic model we've been discussing, with the ideas representing the infinite goods, and the execution being the main scarcity. So, in the same way that freeing up music helps expand the opportunities for every other area of the music business, opening up your idea is likely to open up many huge new opportunities for the entrepreneur in how to execute successfully. If you really want to model it mathematically, you could probably build something based on the economic models that made Paul Romer famous (and should eventually net him a Nobel prize), but that might be overkill for what Burnham is looking for. However, if you're familiar with Romer's work, applying it to this scenario should make you see how much more powerful sharing ideas can be vs. keeping them secret. It's not just a small edge -- it can be a huge difference. I've been working on a few simpler models myself that I'm hoping to share (openly and freely!) soon enough, in the hopes that others can improve on them.

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Myhrvold's Myth: Invention Capital

Mike Masnick — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:05:00 PDT

Nathan Myhrvold may have a way with words, but it doesn't mean that what he's doing with Intellectual Ventures makes any sense. At the D: conference yesterday, Myrhvold tried to position his company as being in the "invention capital" business, talking about how he's creating a model to fund inventions, and even comparing himself to Thomas Edison (while dancing around several questions that tried to get him to point out what the company has actually done other than hoard patents). This is a modification on the easily debunked claim he made a couple weeks ago about how owning a patent and not using it to build a product was the same as investing in a company and not working there.

But, the real problem goes right back to the core issue that was brought out in Malcolm Gladwell's profile of Myhrvold. Ideas are popping up everywhere. It's the execution that matters. Lots of folks are having similar ideas at about the same time, but those ideas are meaningless without the corresponding execution (at which point many people often realize the original idea wasn't that interesting in the first place). So, with ideas being plentiful and execution being scarce, it doesn't make sense to "invest" in ideas separate from the execution. The only way that it would make sense is if you then were taking those ideas and artificially trying to limit their usefulness -- which is exactly what Myhrvold is doing with IV. He's artificially trying to limit the use of ideas, and make it more expensive for anyone to execute on those ideas. The very concept of what he's doing is to hold back innovation and progress. That's the exact opposite of what the patent system was intended to do.

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Ideas Are Easy... Execution Is Difficult

Mike Masnick — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:10:00 PDT

It's an ongoing theme around here, but ideas are everywhere. The real trick to making something great often has extremely little to do with the idea, and much more to do with the execution. That's where the real innovation occurs -- in taking an idea and trying to figure out how to make it useful. It's that process that's important, much more than the original idea. As nearly anyone who has brought a product from conception to market will tell you, what eventually succeeds in the market is almost always radically different than the original "idea." That's part of the reason why patents are so often harmful to innovation. The patent is for that core idea, which is rarely the key in making something successful. But by limiting who can innovate off of the idea (or just by making it much more expensive) you're limiting that process of innovation.

Some people disagree with this, but the failure of Cambrian House, once again seems to demonstrate the vast gap between ideas and execution. Cambrian House was a well-hyped company that tried to "crowdsource" new companies and products. I've paid attention to them for a while, since their business model had some similarities to what we do with the Techdirt Insight Community. However, as the founder of Cambrian House admitted in explaining the company's changing plans, it wasn't difficult to get people to come up with all sorts of interesting and exciting ideas -- but where the company failed was in getting anyone to actually execute on any of those ideas. Ideas are a starting point -- but it's high time that we stopped worshipping the idea, and started recognizing how much more important execution is in driving innovation.

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You Succeed By Executing Well, Not By Gathering Patents

Mike Masnick — Thu, 6 Mar 2008 06:38:00 PST

Patent attorney Joe Root sent us a link to an interesting essay on how companies became way too focused on intellectual property over executing sound business strategy in the late 90's, thanks in large part to the book, Rembrandts In The Attic. Root points out that the poster-children in that book were companies that focused too much on patents alone, and failed to execute in the marketplace, leading to failures. At the same time, the company that was held up in the book as missing out on the patent train was Amazon.com, which the book predicted would lead to Amazon's downfall. Amazingly, the authors of the book even focused in on Amazon's failure to patent its "one-click" ordering system:

"Amazon's commercial fortunes would have been far better served had it patented technologies truly strategic to its business, such as the one-click ordering system that the company pioneered and that is used widely by on-line retailers today. That was a real business method choke point... that Amazon could have controlled to no small advantage. But as it is, without that proprietary advantage and with its brand strength eroding, companies like Virgin Records and PetSmart are unafraid to compete directly against the giant on-line retailer. Don't be surprised if Amazon's stock market fortunes head south when investors realize this fact."

Of course, as most everyone probably already knows, and as Root highlights in the essay, Amazon actually was in the process of patenting the one-click feature. Yet, rather than helping the company, that one patent (to this day, actually!) has become a symbol of just how screwed up the patent system has become. It also created tremendous ill-will towards Amazon until the company was forced to back down from attempts to enforce it.

The key realization that comes from Root's essay (which also dips into military strategy) is that, in the big rush to focus on the value of "IP" and patents in particular, many companies out there forgot that patents are rather meaningless if you can't actually execute on a business strategy providing something that the market actually values at a price they can afford.

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Just Copying Someone's Technology Isn't Enough

Mike Masnick — Fri, 8 Feb 2008 18:18:00 PST

When discussing patent related stories, people often claim that without patents, copycat companies would simply copy everything and put the original creators out of business. There are a number of reasons why this isn't true (and plenty of historical evidence that it's not true at all), but for a good example of this at work, just take a look at Google. Google is by far the dominant search engine out there, and it's only been growing. It was first to market with a quality search engine, but many studies have pointed out that Yahoo and Microsoft have both caught up (and possibly passed) Google in terms of search quality. And yet, Google keeps growing. There are plenty of reasons for this, from Google's "celebrity" (as the article implies) to Google's clean interface to people generally trusting Google more than those other providers (to date, Google has done much less to piss off most people). None of those things have anything to do with the technology alone. There's this view among patent system supporters that the technology is everything, when it's really just a component in terms of what makes a business. Copying the technology is one thing, but there are advantages to being first to market, executing well, treating customers right and building a reputation. Just copying someone's technology won't get you very far on most of those other points, and shows that focusing solely on patents as a competitive advantage is unlikely to get you very far.

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