• No truly innovative idea is ever successful.
• No successful idea is truly innovative.

Amazon, Facebook, and (various) Microsoft products seem to fit this assertion.

Amazon, in its early days, was merely replacing paper catalogues. Books were a good product and JIT systems were core, but none of the business model was new.

Facebook was replacing email groups, but even those were modeled after letter based systems. The business model had existed in the form of newspapers, magazines, and the mail.

Microsoft’s failure of JavaScript on the command line (hta/cscript), compared to the success of Node.js, has always startled me. The only real difference I can see is that Node was introduced 12 years later.

There are ebbs and flows, and better and worse examples, and probably even exceptions to this rule. Startling today is the death of the database, no longer are DBs a standard part of the average individual’s day-to-day operations, instead they are massive specialized operations that the average individual does not comprehend. Good-bye Access, Lotus, Base, and others….