Bloggers and online entrepreneurs want to start with a brand new idea. But I see that there are very few big ideas that have become great businesses (for computers and online world at least) for those who pioneered it. Let us look at few examples.
- Microsoft Windows (like it or not) has changed the face of the personal computers but Windows is not the first operating system. No it is not even the Microsoft’s DOS or MS DOS. It was IBM DOS and as of today I am not sure if IBM DOS exists.
- Google is not the first search engine online either. There were many other search engines like Lycos, AltaVista before Google.
- Facebook is not the first social media site and GMail is not the first Email service provider either.
What is it that makes them better than the pioneers? They created similar product but understood the pain points of the customer with the existing product and took steps to improve those pain points.
- MS-DOS worked on WYSIWYG and moved to Windows. As far as I can remember Windows 3.1 used to boot from DOS and then we had to type the command Win to get to windows GUY based Interface.
- Google Search was far better than those crappy search engines. Similar things can be said about GMail as well. I remember when I used to be on Yahoo and Hotmail and always had to cleanup my inbox because of the low space of 6MB and 2MB respectively and GMail started with 1 GB.
- Facebook understood the pain point’s people have on other social platforms.
Google has repeatedly entered into markets that already exist and crush competitors. Google is trying social media space for quite sometime with Orkut, Google Buzz, Google Wave and now Google+.
So if you trying to work on a new idea, I think you should not try to re-invent the wheel but work on an idea that you use often but find lot of pain points when using it.
