
No, that is not a competitive advantage - gthank
http://blog.asmartbear.com/not-competitive-advantage.html
======
edw519
This reminds me of my favorite quote from my favorite business book,
Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout, with emphasis on "Anything that others
could claim just as well as you can, eliminate.":

 _The best way to really enter minds that hate complexity and confusion is to
oversimplify your message. The lesson here is not to try to tell your entire
story. Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the
mind. That sudden hunch, that creative leap of the mind that "sees" in a flash
how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from
general intelligence. If there's any trick to finding that simple set of
words, it's one of being ruthless about how you edit the story you want to
tell. Anything that others could claim just as well as you can, eliminate.
Anything that requires a complex analysis to prove, forget. Anything that
doesn't fit with your customers' perceptions, avoid._

[http://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-
Comp...](http://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-
Competition/dp/0470223391/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278949159&sr=8-2)

------
arturadib
Although I agree that adding a new feature is not enough to make a product
stand out, there is one case where a new feature can mean everything: When the
product is designed entirely around it.

Case in point: Posterous. As discussed more extensively by Dustin Curtis (link
below), their novel feature was to allow blog posts by email. Any existing
blogging platform could have added this feature. But Posterous is different;
the product _is_ posting-by-email.

I think something similar can be said about Twitter. Again, any social
networking site could have added the option to send short text messages to
their _already_ large user base. Facebook in a sense encompassed Twitter with
its News Feed.

But again, Twitter is different; short text messages _are_ the product.

[http://blog.dustincurtis.com/i-dont-laugh-at-startup-
ideas-a...](http://blog.dustincurtis.com/i-dont-laugh-at-startup-ideas-
anymore)

~~~
dminor
Feature X isn't a competitive advantage if it's easily copied. Competitive
advantages are things that others cannot attain or cannot attain without great
difficulty.

~~~
arturadib
I guess you didn't get my point.

If the feature _is_ the product, then the only way someone else can copy your
feature is by redesigning their entire product. That's a huge barrier of
(re)entry for existing competitors, and hence a competitive advantage.

If you're worried about newcomers, there isn't much you can do to argue for
competitive advantage anyway. Most software ideas can easily be copied no
matter what.

Except perhaps when the idea targets highly specialized markets and your team
already has experts in the topic, and only a few such experts exist in the
world. E.g. high-frequency trading platforms, etc.

But in most software startups, that's hardly the case.

~~~
dminor
> If the feature is the product, then the only way someone else can copy your
> feature is by redesigning their entire product. That's a huge barrier of
> (re)entry for existing competitors...

And my point is this isn't the definition of competitive advantage.

> Most software ideas can easily be copied no matter what.

Which is why most software doesn't have any inherent competitive advantage :)

------
F_J_H
I've always thought this was a great quote:

"Here is what the success of everything depends...on seeing things in a way
which afterwards proves to be true, even though it cannot be established at
the moment..." Joseph A. Schumpeter, Economist

With everyone having access to mostly the same information and the same tools,
it is the person who sees possibilities where others do not who is able to
start something successful.

~~~
Gormo
Isn't there a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem there?

Perhaps your forward-thinking vision turns out to be true precisely because
you were successful in implementing it.

If I'm trying to scale what works in the immediate here-and-now into something
that is sustainable in the long term, I'd prefer to be able to adapt my vision
to changing circumstances, rather than stick with a single, consistent
viewpoint in the hope that it later proves to be "true".

~~~
johnrob
I'd say less of a chicken-or-egg, and more about making yourself available for
luck. Founders and investors all have their opinions of what will or will not
work. Nobody really knows though. And if the founders can get what it takes to
build and push a product, the beauty is that everyone gets to find out. You
might get lucky and have a hit, and you might not. But without building
anything, you don't get the chance to be lucky.

I'm not saying that success is solely due to luck. A smart startup will
continually make itself available to luck by iterating the product and not
giving up. If it's willing to do this indefinitely, success is almost a
guarantee.

------
nailer
> Innovative design and intellectual property are no longer long-term
> competitive advantages.

Really? Google and Apple don't get advantage from their great design and
engineering talent?

> You live in the era where the most powerful programming frameworks and tools
> are free, local broadband and high-availability servers are cheap, and
> world-class people are willing to work 60 hours/week in exchange for Ramen
> noodles and the chance to be a part of a cool new startup.

Yes, but tools are tools. Most people still make shit with them.

~~~
rythie
Apple's unfair advantage is a massive base of loyal fans who will follow every
move Apple makes, track the SteveNote live and buy the products on pre-order
(and pay a high price for them).

Other companies release products of a similar quality to Apple and don't get
anywhere near the press coverage or sales.

~~~
lsc
do you remember the 90s?

man, everyone thought apple was stupid. something you'd only use if you got it
for free.

I mean, the same complaints were voiced then as now (e.g. it's essentially a
closed hardware platform) but unlike now, they didn't have the upside. They
weren't "cool"

At the time, most people had used apples because apple gave computers away to
schools. Really, I think it was a bad strategy, because we all came away with
the idea that apples were slow, outdated, broken garbage which couldn't run
anything more interesting than 'Oregon trail'

so, uh, yeah. I'm personally still not a fan of apple. but I can certainly say
they didn't always have the masses of loyal fans they have now. (I mean, they
had fans, but they were few, and generally looked upon with the pity one has
for BeOS or Ameiga fans.) This large and "cool" apple fandom is actually a
pretty recent development. Now, i'm way out of touch, and most of the people I
meet are *NIX users, so I wouldn't really know, but as far as I can tell, it
really started with the advent of OS-x.

edit: as others point out, my point of view is probably a little different...
as I'm a technical person, and apple did not really start appealing to the
technical crowd until os-X.

~~~
alextingle
Um, Apple' has _always_ concentrated on well-designed, top-end products. They
have _always_ charged huge margins. The drum beat of their marketing
throughout the '90s was "our products are better designed". And they were.
Even the "boring" beige pizza-box Macs from 1995 were amazingly well put
together, both hardware and software.

What's changed is that the good design has moved from the heart of their
products out to the skin. Today an iPhone looks great (really, great) but you
can't even change the battery! How far have Apple come from the days when they
cared so much about their users that they even thought to put little pull-out
feet on the inside, so that when you opened it up to change the hard-drive
everything unfolded with an easy grace?

~~~
Ralith
Far enough to be far more successful, it would seem.

------
Silhouette
The basic premise behind the first point, "We have feature X", seems to be
that someone could do the same thing better than you. Well, of course they
could.

But the thing is, you've _already done it_. While some hypothetical competitor
is trying to catch up to you by copying your existing feature and perhaps
making incremental improvements with the advantage of hindsight, you don't
need to stand still. You can already be building the next generation of newer
and better things. You have exactly the same "public" hindsight to draw on in
doing so, and you also have whatever beneficial experience your team
accumulated from having done it once already. For any software project or
anything with a significant user interface component, that experience can be
worth a fortune.

So while "We have feature X" may not be a competitive advantage, "We have
feature X _NOW_ " certainly is, assuming feature X is something the market
wants and you've done it well enough for the market to buy your product.

It's surprising to me that the author of the blog post, who sounds like
someone involved in funding start-ups, doesn't seem to have got the memo about
ideas being cheap and good executions being the valuable thing, nor to
acknowledge any possible first-mover advantage if you have an important
feature before anyone else.

~~~
smartbear
I agree with you that having a feature is useful now, which is why I
specifically wrote in the article that it "isn't a long-term advantage."

Typically the "first-mover" advantage is one of marketing, not features. That
is, you get a bunch of attention and hooked users so others have to compare
with you and steal customers instead of having a green field.

Just having a "Feature" first can still be an advantage too, e.g. Apple's
retinal display, but I still feel this isn't enough.

Also agreed that if you CONTINUALLY produce amazing unique features -- like
Apple -- THAT is a competitive advantage, but just having one isn't.

~~~
ThomPete
Whether and how features matter is a pretty fuzzy field.

One thing is certain though, features and success is not by any metrics in a
one to one relationship with each other.

------
fookyong
"We have a gigantic amount of funding"

and

"We have a gigantic amount of domain knowledge"

are two "true" competitive advantages.

one allows you to out-market the competition, the other allows you to out-
think them.

~~~
webwright
Knowledge doesn't allow anyone to out-think anyone. Who has more domain
knowledge in mobile 3 years ago-- Motorola or Apple? Most of the successful
founders I can think of didn't know much about their space before they jumped
into it.

~~~
fookyong
good point, but then I could counter-argue that Apple had more domain
knowledge in the area of building and marketing consumer electronics that
people love :)

depends where you see the domain as being.

~~~
webwright
Bah, that's not a domain-- but I agree with you. The best "domain" is being
awesome and making stuff that people absolutely love. That often trumps domain
knowledge, funding, etc.

Might be challenging selling that idea to investors, though! :-)

------
AlexBlom
In anything other than tech many of these can be considered a competitive
advantage. That's where the lines get blurred. I wonder how many applicants
were recent grads without fully understanding the industry.

------
greenlblue
Is there any particular reason he is doing this in a teaser trailer kind of
approach? "Next week's episode is the real episode you want to watch?"

~~~
jodrellblank
Maybe ability to make you commit now to reading his next blog post _is_ a
competetive advantage?

~~~
greenlblue
Well his approach annoyed me so I'm gonna stay away and not worry about what
he has to say. Whatever he says will permeate through the internet quickly
enough so keeping people waiting till next week is not really a competitive
advantage.

------
yason
The really good, grand ideas tend to be copied quickly because ideas are cheap
to copy but expensive to come up with.

In software companies, I also think that a competitive advangage can only be
hard, actual, time-consuming work.

Like customer service. Or making things easy for the user by doing all the
smart work yourself and not leaving all the decisions to him, thus making your
software "just do the right thing".

If you can afford to do such hard work then other's can't copy it except by
doing the same amount of work to provide equally excellent service, and this
only benefits everyone. And if they don't, it only benefits you and your
customers.

~~~
alexro
I'm very with you on that one, but how you gonna pitch such advantages to seed
investors early on?

------
10ren
real competitive advantages:

(1). New technology that you have developed secretly and roadmapped into the
future (so that as your previous release is copied, you are ready to release
the next one). Of course, those developments must also be needed by customers
(eg. enhance an attribute that they care about; meaning that the initial
release was lacking in this aspect, yet it still had some core value that made
it worth buying). It's a bit like having your own private giant upon whose
shoulders to stand. Because you've done the experiments, you've seen more. You
do more experiments, and see more again. This is keeping ahead of the
engineering curve, and so it's a supply-side advantage.

(2). Customers that have developed a habit of using your product, especially
if they have changed their behaviour in order to adopt it (they might have
done so because you were the only one to offer the technology, and then being
the one with the best technology - due to point 1). This is related to
switching costs. Demand side.

(3). Related to point 2 is when you not just have customers, but you are
recognized as the leader, because you have dominant market share (here's where
it's an advantage to focus on a niche: it's easier to dominate a small pond
that a big one). Psychologically, people like winners. It also means that you
win all sorts of races, where people have to make a choice: third-parties
choose to support you; big companies choose to standardize on you; users
choose to train for your product. Demand side.

(4). Network effects! Again with the customers, but here, because of
interaction between customers, the value of the product is proportional to the
square of the number of customers. This makes it harder to stop you, but you
first need to be ahead - so it's more of a multiplier than a CA in itself.
Demand side.

(5). Feedback. Once you have customers, you get feedback from them, and you
can improve. If you can get this feedback before your competitors (eg. by
launching before them), it can help you keep ahead. It's a kind of secret
information, as you learn about what the market really wants; and it's also
specialized to your product. In these senses, it is proprietary (owned by
you). Another private giant. Supply side.

(6). Revenue. Once you have money coming in, it's a kind of magic, because you
can reinvest and grow. Smaller competitors can't match this (assuming you can
spend the money in ways that make a difference - like advertising - but it can
be surprisingly difficult to find such ways...) And even large companies don't
want to bother competing with you, once you really get going (they might buy
you though). Supply side.

(7). Although particular skills can help, there's always someone smarter, more
experienced etc. However, I like to think that a particular combination of
skills can approach a hard-to-replicate advantage (though of course it has to
make a difference to the start up. It's no good being an art-expert + TCL
programmer unless that's somehow needed).

(8). There are also milder ones like good PR (a kind of advertising), being
attractive to talented workers (which in turn increase your success), being
inspirational (more advertising).

I agree about patents. They're a good piece of paper as a bargaining chip in
acquisitions.

Now, the difficult thing for me is to apply these abstract ideas to my own
actual startup (it's easier to be wise when you're not involved). They all
seem to point to agility and getting your product out there _now_. Scary.

~~~
cookiecaper
This is nice but almost all of these depend on an already existing product
with a significant userbase. My presumption is that most people applying for
YC or similar seed-stage groups don't have an existing product. So that makes
addicted customers, revenue, etc. irrelevant in this context.

I am looking forward to seeing what the author considers "competitive
advantages". The only one I can think of is the team behind it. That's all you
have when you're starting out anyway.

~~~
10ren
reality can be inconvenient. Why not accept the challenge of guessing what the
author will say (eg. by researching on wikipedia or Porter's _competitive
advantage_ )? It's one of the most effective learning strategies - get it
right or wrong, you won't forget.

One approach is to not expect to have customer-based competitive advantage at
the start, but have a _plan_ of how to get there. Eg. a product that has
network effects + a plan for how to get there.

I think the idea of enduring or sustainable competitive advantage is a bit
misleading, because things always change, so competitive advantage is dynamic.
It can be more helpful to in terms of the duration of a competitive advantage.
For example, when you start off with an easy-to-copy product that is in
demand, you do have a competitive advantage - it's just that it doesn't last
long. But you can use that brief period to build the next competitive
advantage. (in rock climbing, a _dynamic move_ is when you are not statically
supported, but rely on your momentum to reach a stable point).

------
davidw
I'm curious to see how his view of things fits in with the 37 signals "just do
less" view. What is _their_ unfair competitive advantage? Or do they think you
don't need one?

~~~
webwright
Their competitive advantage was that they had a pretty huge and passionate
following (between SvN and DHH being the face of RoR) before they ever
launched their first product. Not dissimilar to Joel Spolsky and the Coding
Horror guy launching StackOverflow to instant success (but largely fail to see
great success with non-geek-oriented StackOverflow sites).

If you can be charismatic enough to collect a bunch of evangelists (among the
people who talk and link most on the web) and then build a pretty good product
that is designed for that audience, you'll succeed. I think 37s stuff and
StackOverflow are pretty good, by the way.

Doing less is NOT a competitive advantage (as evidenced by the army of 37s
copycats who realize that not many companies can get away with zero
sales/marketing).

~~~
slantyyz
With respect to Stack Overflow, I think they were an instant success largely
because they are infinitely less douchey than their competitors, who put up
barriers and paywalls to see answers.

~~~
webwright
Less douchey doesn't = win. Compare Evite to any of its competitors (notably,
the YC company AnyVite) in terms of traffic. Or check out eBay's competitors.

It certainly helped, I'm sure. But it's a tiny slice of the pie when compared
to their initial burst of free leadgen due to fame/audience. It would have had
a serious cold-start problem if they'd launched it anonymously.

------
JoeAltmaier
Building a Better Mousetrap has been considered a business plan for a century.
So its not a competitive advantage? How about timing, marketing, message?
Those sunk Beta.

------
bsnss-mn-cdr
While I do believe there are genuine cases where a new company does have a
'competitive advantage' most do not. At the end of the day the only advantage
a company should strive for is how to use their skill, resources and
relationships to make more money than their competitors. MySpace was on a
great growth path before a lot of people even knew what Facebook even was.
They had more financial resources sooner than Facebook and had a lot of ‘cool’
corporate sponsors to provide brand equity before Facebook. At the end of the
day what they did just felt better to more and more users and what MySpace
didn't do made it an easy case to switch. It is not that MySpace could not
replicate the features of Facebook it was the fact MySpace didn't.

------
rmah
Well, it's fine that the author gives many examples of what he feels are not
advantages. But he doesn't give a single example of what he feels are solid
competitive advantages. Left me feeling disappointed.

~~~
tbrownaw
_P.S. Next week I'll talk about what_ are _real competitive advantages._

Which I suppose makes sense, as it's supposed to be part of a series.

------
charlesju
The real question is what successful startups would fall into this guy's
criteria. Then the follow-up, which successful startups wouldn't fall into
this guy's criteria.

------
d0m
Depending of the feature, copying it takes time. And while your competitor is
copying it, you're working on the next version of your product with others new
innovative features. So, I disagree with a fact that a feature is not a
competitive advantage. I.e. google with their first smart way to crawl the web
was a huge advantage. This advantage may not be there forever, however, it IS
an advantage.

------
parallax7d
Advantages is determined by the existing competition.

If they aren't innovative, and you are, it's a competitive advantage.

Same goes for anything in your business model that you can do better than the
existing competition.

Worrying about newcomers is a good idea, but pretending that your magical zord
of power will give you a permanent advantage over people and companies that
don't exist yet is largely pointless.

------
adamilardi
We have three PhDs / MBAs. Can certainly be an advantage. People who come from
the best school's will probably have a much easier time raising money than a
company of college grads from run of the mill universities.

~~~
dgabriel
>best school's

Maybe.

~~~
adamilardi
Were you making a snarky comment about my grammatical error or where you
agreeing with me? ... maybe

~~~
adamilardi
*were

------
snowbird122
We should all really be thinking in terms of sustainable competitive
advantages. Serious question: How can a startup software company create a
sustainable competitive advantage?

------
Murkin
"I am very lucky"

Might not look like a great competitive advantage, but looking back, is a
major advantage of many a successful startup. Might as well put it in...

------
andrewtj
For a hosted service in a mature market would an open source core be
considered an advantage, disadvantage or irrelevant?

------
adnam
I thought the real meaning of "competitive advantage" was simply having
profits greater than the average in your sector.

~~~
adnam
<http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/competitive-advantage/>

------
HilbertSpace
"80% of Americans believe they are better-than-average drivers. Can't be true,
right?"

No, not "right".

For any finite (> 1) set of people on nearly any measure, it is easy for all
but one to be "better than average".

E.g., for any positive integer n > 1, everyone gets a 1 except the one person
with a 0 so that the average is (n - 1)/n < 1.

Done.

~~~
alextp
Yes, abstractly, of course. On the other hand, this sort of distribution is
usually gaussian (a whole bunch of average drivers, and a few specially good
and bad ones), and it is true that 80% of the people can't be above average if
they are samples from a well-behaved distribution (with controlled skewness,
and in the correct scale, etc)

~~~
HilbertSpace
"this sort of distribution is usually gaussian".

No. That distributions are commonly Gaussian is some quasi-mystical nonsense
left over from 'psychometrics' about 100 years ago.

The most common way to get a Gaussian distribution is from the central limit
theorem, and it's much worse than clumsy to argue its assumptions here.

Gaussian needs MUCH more than your "a whole bunch of average drivers, and a
few specially good and bad ones".

Your "well-behaved" is asking far too much for practice or reality. Gaussian
isn't "well-behaved"; from Melon in 'Back to School', it's "fantasy land".
E.g., there's no reason to believe that can have your "controlled skewness".

On your "scale", sure, if know the distribution and if it is absolutely
continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure, then can pick a scale that
maintains order and yields Gaussian. The educational testing people love to do
this. It's quasi-religion. And we collect taxes to pay them for that?

Yes, for stock market data can argue that changes in price each 15 seconds are
independent and identically distributed with finite mean and variance so that
the central limit theorem applies so that the change in price from noon today
to noon next week will be Gaussian. Of course there are traders driving
Ferraris laughing at that.

Do yourself a favor: For real data, assume mean and variance exist and are
finite, but without a really careful appeal the the central limit theorem
dumpster Gaussian. For multivariate data, don't even think about Gaussian.

Uh, some diffusion processes in physics might give you 3D Gaussian quite
accurately.

~~~
alextp
To be pedantic, most people usually mean "median" (or a robust estimation of
the mean without considering outliers) by average, and in samples from a
continuous distribution it is necessarily true that ~50% are above/below the
median.

~~~
HilbertSpace
You are not being "pedantic". You are being wrong.

There's no reason to assume that commonly mean means median or that there are
enough properties to make them equal.

Besides a claim about "most people" without some solid data is poor support
for anything.

------
HilbertSpace
" If you've lived in the software world for a few years you know the stuff
they teach you in school is irrelevant"

Knowing how this is wildly false can be the source of an enormously valuable
competitive advantage. But, keep believing such nonsense stuff, guys! I'll let
you know when to change your mind!

------
HilbertSpace
Look, guys, this thread and its article are making a big, gigantic, HUGE
mistake.

Why? Heavily because the 'culture' here is limited almost entirely just to
computer programming. Also, the business examples are limited almost entirely
to Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

For software, here call that hardly more than load-store, calculate, if-then-
else, do-while, allocate-free, read-write, and call-return. Okay, we are all
now on the same page for 'software'.

Uh, let's get in a little info helicopter and rise up to about 10,000 feet and
get a wider view. So, the view we want is of 'information technology' and its
entrepreneurship.

So, for the entrepreneurship, as in Web 2.0, we want to please the users and
paying customers, e.g., the advertisers. The advertisers are mostly on a
monotonous diet: They want clicks. But they are cheap: They want the most
clicks per ad dollar.

So, we need to please the users and get lots of clicks per ad dollar.

One way to please the users is to give them 'information' they will like.

So, in both cases, we have some data, process it with software, and get out
more data that we regard as the information we want to please the users and
get lots of clicks per ad dollar.

A big question is how to process that data. Or how to convert data into
information. We want powerful means for doing that.

So, where do we find out how to process input data to give desired output
data? I.e., where do we go for such recipes for such 'secret sauce'?

Sure, so far in computing, the processing has mostly been just intuitive
heuristics or automation of what people understood well how to do in principle
just manually.

Can there be more? Actually, not much from computer science: E.g., lists,
queues, trees, parsing, etc., in a cooking analogy, just grind grain into
flour but don't say how to make, say, a Sacher Torte.

Here is a hint from the word information: Or, as we know from Shannon, there
is information theory which is really just some applied math. So, really, it's
math that is the academic source of knowledge and techniques for processing
input data to give desirable output data. Uh, it ain't high school math, and
college calculus doesn't go very far.

What can be done with that material is far beyond what can be done intuitively
or manually.

Can use this material to construct 'secret sauce' for the processing.

This secret sauce need not be at all easy to duplicate: Sure, the US National
Academy of Sciences could put together a team, but nearly no one in business
would or could.

So, if the secret sauce is powerful and its application valuable and is
sufficiently obscure not to be easily duplicated, then it can be a
"competitive advantage".

"But everyone has access to the same math". Not in any important practical
sense! Might need a well designed undergrad major in pure math. What fraction
of the computer programming community has that? Getting it takes ballpark four
years. Then might need a few years of carefully selected graduate mathematics.
Now what fraction? Some of the most important material may be rarely taught.
Now what fraction? We're getting down to a convention in a phone booth, guys.
Then do some original derivations. Now we can be down to one guy and the guy
he sees in his mirror.

Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, etc., write all the checks you want, but you will
have a tough time finding anyone who can make sense out of this, find the
right rack in the right section of a research library, read the right books
and papers, and redo the original derivations, in less than years. You'll be
"digging in the wrong place". The commonly claimed "deep domain knowledge"
will leave you walking randomly in the stacks and getting exhausted. There can
be little more discouraging than an unguided tour without prerequisites of
some of the more important books and papers.

Are there lots of examples now? In business, no. Thankfully for US national
security, yes: For decades, the US DoD has seen these things very clearly.

Can it work in business? Hmm ....

"But it's not the mainstream; that is, it's at most just tiny, niche stuff."

Uh, a movie starts out, "The early history of America is a tale of great first
times." Well, we're still trying to have "great first times". So, don't try to
copy Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc.

Or, to see farther than others, stand on the shoulders of giants.

Fortunately, on selected shelves of the research libraries, actually can find
such shoulders and no one standing on them, in that library or any others.
Then can do some original derivations, translate that work to if-then-else,
do-while, etc., have at low costs lots of great infrastructure software,
processor cores, main memory and disk bytes, and Internet bandwidth.

What a country! What a time!

But it ain't just routine computer programming, guys.

~~~
stan_rogers
Interesting problem space, but not the only valid one, nor the only one likely
to give one a sustainable advantage in the commercial space. In fact, there's
probably more to be made in developing a heart-friendly Sachertorte-style
dessert (trademark would keep one from calling it by that name) with an icing
that is as good as or better than the original and marketing it (and a
cookbook full of recipes that don't include your magical icing) via a twenty-
minute PHP "project".

HNe is not about the outer reaches of computing possibilities (although the
subject tends to interest most of us, and if you pay attention you'll find
that Shannon is familiar to at least a significant subset of the population
here), it is about creating and capitalizing on value. It is about marketable
innovation. Nobody is likely to win a Fields or an Abel for finding a way to
make $9.95/mo from a few tens of millions of people, but whoever does it is
likely to drive a much nicer car than the guy whose life's work is able to
pluck useful security intelligence from a billion digitized telephone
conversations a day (but, since it is classified as top secret ordnance, can
never be marketed). And if you want to be realistic about it at all, anything
that approaches the limits of the IR noise floor with precision, even limiting
the problem space to text, _is_ going to be so classified. The work may be the
source of great personal pride, but little else. (And when the fifty-year
window opens, you'll be too old for a Fields.) So much for entrepreneurship.

