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Comment by adamkochanowicz | Hacker News Reader

This is also why I roll my eyes at most NDAs.

There were plenty of grocery delivery flops before Instacart and FreshDirect got off the runway. Stop flattering yourself that your idea is that good.

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Thinking about this, many of the big tech firms didn't have original ideas at all, came years, maybe decades after the original ideas were conceived and published. But they executed, refined, situated, packaged, marketed and sold well. What is also common is that an original, more idealized/pure implementation gets stripped of some of the seemingly essential beauty during productization.

Don Norman explains this in the latest edition of The Psychology of Everyday Things (amazing book on product and design, btw). Sometimes, it can take centuries before tech goes from idea to everyday reality in the hands of ordinary people. For example, the videophone was depicted in a famous illustration as early as 1879 [0] but it's only in the past two decades that mobiles have made them somewhat ubiquitous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephonoscope#/media/File:Tel...

Former game designer and former student of Donald Norman.. have to upvote this. I did an internship with Donald Norman in college as part of my major, just because it was a requirement. I was working in a lab at the time and I thought I would get a PhD.

Fast forward five years later when unexpectedly I became a game designer-- everything I learned in that class was gold.

That reminds me; I was listening to a comedy channel on SiriusXM, and it played an old Lewis Black bit. And in it, he referenced using a Blackberry. And I was struck even at the time at how transformative the iPhone was, even though it did nothing original. Every feature of the earliest iPhone existed in a mobile form already...it was just combining them together and executing in a reasonable fashion. Microsoft had tried in the 90s but the tech wasn't there. Blackberry had an extremely successful product, but it mostly targeted business users, with productivity apps, and its use of a physical keyboard made it a chore to use. The iPhone did nothing new...except that it could do all the things the business targeting devices could, while instead targeting consumers, and provided a touchscreen (itself not a new invention, but nevertheless making it stand out in terms of usability).

Execution and market positioning are everything.

The really fun NDAs are the ones where the idea is slightly novel but just a twist on existing techs. Go in and start asking pointed questions on exactly how this or that works and they seem shocked you would know. "its in the docs". One guy had lifted verbatim paragraphs of algs out of a book that I had just read a year earlier.

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