When Scott Adams nails something, he does it with an excess of 16d nails and a sledge hammer. This nails it.
I have lost track of how many Craigslist and similar ads I’ve read that breathlessly claim the poster has a brilliant idea for a book, play, program, device or (these days) app… and they just need some writer, programmer, engineer or app builder to make it for them. For participation in the huge profits, of course. Sorry if it takes us days to get back to you - sorting through the tsunami of applicants will take time.
“Nothing” - heh, heh, now I have the perfect link to send these ignorant loons.
I’ve read things from plenty of writers about the idiots who come up to them with a great idea for a best seller - the writer just has to write it. This piece of lunacy long predates the Internet.
I had a great idea for the plot of a 2012 end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it book. I just needed a writer to fill in some adjectives and adverbs. Maybe a proper name or three.
When I read of how Bill Gates got started with a simple (primitive by modern standards) operating system and Basic interpreter and basing early DOS on CP/M – Why, I just knew I could have done all that too!
working in an industry where probably half of all Dilbert strips seem like they were written about my workplaces, I can definitely confirm there are a ton of people out there who think “coming up with an idea” is the hard part.
Wait, so I didn’t invent the iPhone back in 1991 in my yet unfinished novel (hey, it is a great story; does anyone want to finish it for me? Half the earnings to for you)?
I don’t know that the strip is entirely correct. I don’t think a good idea is worth nothing. How often do you see (for example) apps that have clearly been funded by someone and coded by someone but are just not a good enough idea to ever take off? IME 90% of “brilliant entrepreneurial ideas” are complete crap that will never make a cent no matter how much funding and engineering time is put into them (as plenty of Dilbert strips would assert).
I fully understand that a truly great idea is not even close to enough of itself to be worth much, but I don’t think it’s worth nothing.
One could argue that Steve Jobs was an “idea guy.” The ideas are important, but you have to show they can be executed on and generate real revenues and scalable growth.
Heh. The first iphone was pretty much Jobs idea and being CEO he employed an outside contract design house to develop it - NOT Apple employees. He DID have the resources to do this. Then he asked the lead consulting engineer to present 2-3 stupid looking variations, then assemble the final iphone prototype from a logical collection of components. After the board approved the Apple engineers cleaned it up and produced successive versions.
Even in the early days of Apple he was more of a promotions, usuability, and human factors critic while Wozniak did most of the technical work.
Let’s get this history straight. Bill Gates and Paul Allen got started with a simple BASIC program that they wrote together for a computer whose BIOS consisted of front panel switches that had to be set to enter data and programs. There was no OS at all. Later after he had moved from Albuquerque to Seattle, he was still essentially in the BASIC business using whatever OS was available, including Apple OS (presumably designed by Steve Wozniak) and CP/M. Then IBM wanted him to write an OS and he sent them to Gary Kildall. I’ve heard a number of versions of what happened there, but I won’t introduce speculation here. At all events IBM came back and asked him to design an OS. That’s when he bought QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) from Tim Paterson and modified it to what was first called IBM-DOS and eventually morphed into MS-DOS. I would say that really the only resemblance between the early IBM-DOS and CP/M was that they were both OSs that worked on the first IBM microcomputers. I owned them both and they were different.
It’s not going to be a good idea though. The programming company I work for gets at least one of these a month (probably more, I’m not in sales), that go vaguely like “I have this Great Idea™ - I don’t have any $$$ but my Idea is so Great that you should make it and we can split the profit 'cause it’s going to make loads of $$$. I just need you to sign an NDA first 'cause because of how Great my Idea is.”
If we don’t ignore them, then at best they cost a sales guy some time but they’re a bit of a laugh. At worst they end up wanting us to do a feasibility study that shows that their idea is either going to cost 10x as much as they think, or has already been done better, or is lame (normally all 3). Also normally they’re surprised when we want them to pay for said feasibility study even when they decided not to execute on Great Idea.
I might argue that Steve Jobs was an idea guy… I would definitely argue that he hustled his ass though, and while for sure he wanted engineers to work late, he didn’t expect them to work for free.