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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

I get your point, and I think it gets to the heart of the matter.

Now that everyone uses Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter on a daily basis, the average person thinks of those as simple 'websites', that are easy to build.

Almost daily I have friends/family come to me with a business idea that starts off as "it will be easy.. just like <huge site> but with blah".

Non-tech people honestly think 'websites' are simple things, and we should be able to knock-out a Facebook or Twitter clone in a few days.

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For some reason non-tech people think desktop applications are always hard to create, and web sites are always simple.

You can extend that to apps too. I can't count the number of items friends/family have had "great" ideas for apps that we could split the profit on.

It wasn't that long ago that everyone had a 13 year old nephew that made websites. Also it is easier to create a very simple website than to create a very simple desktop app, since a simple website doesn't really do anything. There's really no equivalent desktop app to the Geocities type websites.

> Now that everyone uses Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter on a daily basis, the average person thinks of those as simple 'websites', that are easy to build.

I'm really surprised that people actually look at the websites of multi-million dollar internet-only companies and think it must be easy to build something worth that much.

I would estimate that 99% of the people I know that use Facebook / Twitter / Gmail etc. think they are worth basically $0.

After all, who do you know that has paid to use them?

(obviously, I understand the reality, but most don't)

Now that's depressing.

Why does it matter to the average Joe how much a random Tech company is worth? at the end of the day, it's all made up anyway, and the vast majority are waaaaay to concerned with their next payment to think about that stuff anyway.

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