I’ve been thinking a lot more about how ideas alone are worthless. With a restart of the stealth mode discussion, I’ve pretty much decided that the “open sourcing” of ideas is probably more good than bad.
But I’m looking for counter examples…
1. I saw a documentary on Craigslist last night. The filmmakers sent out eight volunteer camera crews all around San Francisco to document people who posted on Craigslist on one particular day. This is a great idea. The execution is what you might expect from eight volunteer camera crews.
2. A poor university student had the idea for The Million Dollar Homepage back on August 23. He launched the site three days later and has made over half a million dollars. There are many copycat sites now (possibly up around 500!), none doing even nearly this good. What if he had shared this idea and someone else was first?
Got any more?
An opposing viewpoint: Your idea isn’t good enough to keep secret…
I think Malik and I actually agree here. He says without execution, your idea is meaningless. Though I’ve given some counter-examples (and I want to hear more), overall it seems that open sourcing ieas is a good thing. You can always close source the execution, stealth mode style.