
The Value of Ideas - alexandros
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_value_of_ideas/
======
ccc3
This post is just plain wrong. Obviously it's tempting to get caught up in
ideas and ignore execution, but saying ideas are flat-out worthless is simply
being ignorant of history. A few examples:

\- Creating an assembly line to mass produce cars in the early 1900s was a
good idea. It clearly wouldn't have gone anywhere without execution, but if
Henry Ford had instead decided to execute flawlessly on a hand-painted rock
business the results would have been far different.

\- Starting a software-only company in the late 70s was a good idea. I'm sure
most people here know Microsoft's story well enough to understand the
importance of execution in this case, but they never would have achieved the
same level of success if they weren't executing on a big idea ("a computer on
every desk and in every home").

\- I think you could argue that the company that makes Snuggies has executed
their idea as well as possible. But because of the nature of their idea they
will never be anything more than a flash-in-the-pan business. There's nothing
wrong with that type of business, but the potential is much smaller.

Yes, your idea matters. It determines what market you'll be addressing and
ultimately sets the upper limit for your success. The real problem is that
people get caught up in ideas because they're more fun than executing.
Realistically the time spent on the idea should probably be a fraction of a
percent of the time spent on execution. Pick an idea that you think you can
execute on and that has large enough potential, then focus 100% on execution.

~~~
jasonlotito
None of your examples detracts from what he is saying. Your suggestion comes
down to level of success. Your examples only work if Henry Ford would be
considered a failure if painted rocks didn't lead to as much success as cars
did, despite the evidence that rocks, painted and unpainted, are still a
market.

~~~
ccc3
He concludes his post by saying:

 _Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything._

The only way that's true is if you consider success to be binary. Either you
succeed or you fail. But level of success is important in terms of economic
value and it is demonstrable that the idea is a factor in level of success.

~~~
pwhelan
Hyperbole is a literary tool to emphasize a point and should be put in context
knowing this.

------
philk
This is a fantastic post by Scott.

I think the great idea fallacy continues because it appeals to people's
fantasy of becoming successful without much work.

Anyone can imagine themselves having a great idea and then being successful.
It's a lot harder (and less pleasant) to imagine taking an unremarkable idea
and spending years of hard work to make it succeed.

~~~
jimbokun
The whole concept of the "great idea" is skewered brilliantly by the Windows 7
ads. We all get a good chuckle watching someone tell us straight faced that,
just because they thought of something that could have been better about
Windows, they can now take credit for it after Microsoft successfully
implemented it in Windows 7.

Could be useful as a reference the next time someone has a business idea that
he "just needs a tech guy to implement."

~~~
grinich
It looks like their agency is still Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. For reference,
here's some of their other work:

Laptop Hunters - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU>

Gates/Seinfeld -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE3XiAxDjA&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE3XiAxDjA&feature=related)

Good News (Kylie) - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU>

Seems like a strange way to advertise.

~~~
aditya
CP+B also did the famous (and awesome) Burger King Get a Whopper for
defriending friends campaign.

~~~
grinich
I just saw that they also did the BK Freakout, where they pretend the Whopper
is discontinued and watch people go nuts. Talk about customer loyalty.

<http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/whopper-freakout.html>

------
michael_nielsen
What a curious post. Pure mathematics is nothing but ideas - often very deep
ones that very few people are capable of originating. If you take Adams
literally, then mathematics is worthless. Is the idea of the Ricci flow, which
Perelman used to prove the Poincare conjecture, really useless?

The problem Adams is addressing, so far as I can see, is that many people
think trivial, easy-to-have ideas are somehow valuable. Of course, that's
false, as Adams says. Value is associated to scarcity. Easy-to-have ideas
aren't valuable, simply because they're not scarce. An idea like the Ricci
flow is valuable, because very few people are capable of having it.

Ditto the ideas behind deep algorithms. PageRank had value in large part
because relatively few people had the depth of insight required to come up
with it.

Come to think of it, the Turing machine was an idea that Turing invented to
formalize Hilbert's intuitive notion of an effective computation. And I think
that idea turned out to have some value.

~~~
jacobolus
That’s an absurd comparison. Generating mathematical conjectures and then
proving them takes decades of preparation and careful study and analysis of a
difficult problem. Generating a movie plot idea at the level Adams is talking
about takes, with no preparation, a few minutes and a dinner napkin.

The equivalent kind of “idea” in mathematics might be “I’m going to understand
and model heat dispersion in a block of metal”, with the “execution” being
developing the underlying machinery (partial differential equations) gathering
enough data, and building a model (the heat equation) that fits the data and
can be used to compute practical approximations. The “idea” part can be done
by anyone; the execution is made up of decades of hard work and hard thought
by several of the world’s most famous mathematicians, building on centuries of
previous effort.

~~~
michael_nielsen
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the idea for Ricci flow or PageRank was
generated with a dinner napkin. Quite literally, I once used a napkin to
explain the Ricci flow to a mathematician, and I've seen dozens of papers
start that way, including a few of my own. Such ideas gain value from their
scarcity, not from some immense complexity.

~~~
jacobolus
Okay, but you wouldn’t come up with PageRank until you’d thought about
searching and sorting big quantities of data for some time. If you were just
trying to sort 10 numbers, you wouldn’t come up with PageRank. It took a
“search the whole web” scale problem for the ideas about how to accomplish it
to start bubbling up to the surface. (Probably a bit of an oversimplification,
but you get the idea.)

Ricci flow isn’t even meaningful until you’ve developed up differential
geometry – not exactly an afternoon stroll for a layman.

~~~
michael_nielsen
I completely agree. My original point was that valuable ideas are very
difficult to have, and thus scarce. That's why Ricci flow and PageRank are
valuable, while "let's build a social network to do X", for some choice of X,
is not. Difficult-to-have and can-write-on-a-napkin are not mutually
exclusive, of course!

~~~
jacobolus
You’re right. The difference is just one of definitions. What you call
“valuable ideas” are what I call “solutions to really hard problems, developed
after years, decades, or sometimes centuries of dedicated work.” What Adams
calls “ideas” (e.g. for movie plots) are a completely different animal.

------
zachbeane
Reminds me of Ed Catmull's talk about Pixar management at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc#t=21m50s> \-- "If you have a good
idea and you give it to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a
mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it, or they'll throw it away and
come up with something else."

------
alan-crowe
I'm not convinced that the idea/execution dichotomy works. Consider the steam
engine of Thomas Newcomen. We may say that it was a triumph of execution. The
earlier Savery engine failed commercially because it used steam pressure and
early boilers and pipe work could not contain it. The idea of using
atmospheric pressure to do work and leaving the steam circuit unpressurised
was the key idea in the Newcomen or Atmospheric Engine. Since this idea was
due to Denis Papin, who failed to exploit it, we may say that the idea was
worthless and Thomas Newcomen's success was due to good execution of Papin's
idea.

Here is a second idea which fills out the rest of this paragraph. In 1712 high
pressure steam was one hundred years ahead of its time. Pipes would leak,
boilers would burst. Papin's idea of using unpressurised steam, condensing it,
and letting atmospheric pressure do the work is obviously stupid, but if you
don't want to wait 100 years, it is the only option, so just persevere and
make it work.

This is idea is the ignition key of the industrial revolution. We cannot
ignore it, and yet it sits in the middle of the gray area between /idea/ and
/execution/, mocking the dichotomy that Scott Adams blogs about.

------
ajscherer
"You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or
bad idea if you don't understand what a movie is or what an idea is."

This is ridiculous. Does he honestly believe that a movie about me eating a
bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of
succeeding as a movie about Batman? Why do some movies get made and others not
if it is meaningless talk about the worth of an idea? Are studio executives
using some random process to determine which movies get made? Do they have no
idea what a movie or an idea is?

Clearly it is meaningful to talk about the quality of ideas, and right now
there is nothing else to talk about with regard to a Dilbert movie.

He has a valid point that the quality of the idea is a marginal factor in the
success of any endeavor, but he generalizes it to the point of absurdity when
he claims you can't discuss the quality of an idea. This sort of careless
generalization seems typical of his blog posts that make it to hn, but I
suppose thats why he is drawing cartoons and not proving theorems.

~~~
jasonlotito
"Does he honestly believe that a movie about Batman eating a bowl of shredded
wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie
about me?"

You're confusing execution with the idea. The idea of you sitting around
eating a bowl of cereal might seem boring, until you look at other ideas.

An author sitting around a hotel in the middle of winter. (The Shining) A
mother and son sitting in a car. (Cujo) Office workers dealing with life.
(Office Space) A man trying to get a rug. (The Big Lebowski)

The idea (A Dilbert movie) isn't the execution. It's merely the idea. A movie
about you doesn't have to be boring. But the execution of it could result in a
boring movie.

The problem with ideas is people always refer to the idea as bad, yet point to
perceived execution as the reason. Just because an idea is good doesn't mean
it's going to be a good movie.

A good idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. A bad idea for a movie
doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

I think Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example. Really, a comedy about POWs in
WW2? Really?

~~~
ajscherer
"A good idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. A bad idea for a
movie doesn't mean it's a bad idea."

This is exactly what I meant when I said that the quality of an idea is a
marginal factor in the success of an endeavor. I fully agree that execution
should be the main focus.

What I was trying to say is that not all ideas are equal. You can always make
a worse movie with a better idea, or vice versa, but some ideas are easier to
pull off than others. Given the exact same level of execution, "Batman fights
the Joker" will beat "Random nobody in Nebraska sits in the dark eating
cereal" every single time.

If all ideas are of equal quality, why would Hogan's Heroes be an excellent
example? Wouldn't all examples then be equally good or bad?

Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example precisely because the idea is harder to
pull off than other ideas. If you gave Hogan's Heroes and American Idol each
to 100 teams to turn into a show, I believe American Idol would become a hit
with greater frequency than Hogan's Heroes.

~~~
pwhelan
I know "12 Angry Men" that might beg to differ about people just sitting
around making a great film.

Regarding Hogan's Heroes -- some ideas might require better execution to
succeed. Tablet computers, which have been around for a while, seem like a
good example of this. Or a social networking site, or a stock trading
algorithm, etc.

------
timf
Saying ideas are "worthless" is a hyperbolic way to put things. Why can't
people say "an idea's _relative_ importance is not as big as many people
think."

I think Derek Sivers puts it nicely, it is a multiplier (but yes you need to
execute in the first place): <http://sivers.org/multiply>

~~~
mrvir
Yes, provocative illustration, but very entertaining, I admit. The magic trick
was to reduce every idea to one word or one sentence. Can be used to make any
movie plot sound weird.

------
lukev
Some ideas are easier to execute than others. It is certainly _possible_ to
create an award-winning movie about two gay cowboys, but I bet there are far
fewer writers/directors who could pull it off than those who could produce yet
another successful romantic comedy.

So if your one goal is to make a successful movie, your chances of success are
_probably_ better if you choose to do a romantic comedy rather than a movie
about two gay cowboys. Unless, of course, you are confident in your ability to
make an amazing gay cowboy movie, in which case you should do it.

In other words, execution is everything, but that doesn't mean you should
ignore ideas when deciding what to do.

------
toby
This seems like a false dichotomy, yet one that's argued all the time. The
actual argument seems to be about the definition of the word "idea".

Maybe the word "Titanic" is a bad idea for a movie. It's not even really an
idea at all. The actual idea for "Titanic" was a very high-budget, ominous,
cross-cultural love story with great special effects set on a famous ship. But
at what point are we talking about execution? Execution is itself a series of
good ideas to materialize a concept, right?

What's certainly true is that "A Dilbert movie" is not a sufficiently
developed idea for anyone to say whether it's good or not. Of course, the role
of cultural critics is not to elucidate uncertainty but to make strong
statements that others will read and argue about.

------
m0th87
Seems like an over-simplification to me. An idea without execution is
worthless. But execution without an idea is pretty worthless too.

Even if I mastered execution, I couldn't sell a product that costs you $100
and punched you in the face every time you used it, because it's a shitty
idea.

~~~
moron4hire
boxing trainer, boom.

I tried to come up with one myself (shitty idea) and thought I had one with
"beer that tastes like urine", but then I realized that such a product could
conceivably find a market with alcoholics trying to condition themselves
against drinking.

So yes, even Miller and Coors still have a market (sorry, home-brewer joke).

~~~
jimbokun
"I tried to think of a shitty idea with no potential market, and came up with
'beer that tastes like urine.' Then I realized Miller and Coors beat me to
it."

(trying to show the importance of the execution of an idea)

~~~
moron4hire
Okay, how about clothing that melts away when it gets wet? Got anything there?

~~~
Xurinos
Sounds like something you would go to your local "sensual items" shop for, and
given Rule 34, it likely already exists. Certainly some candied versions do.

------
arethuza
A slight nitpick: Hogan's Heroes was about a prison camp for Allied POWs - not
a concentration camp.

~~~
mynameishere
[http://www.hogansheroesfanclub.com/images/magazineMad108Janu...](http://www.hogansheroesfanclub.com/images/magazineMad108January1967Page8Medium.gif)

------
jamesbritt
"For example, here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic."

Hmm, expect that doesn't strike me as an idea for a movie so much as an idea
for an idea for a movie.

An idea may be worthless if it is little more than a potential trigger word or
some vague imagery. It can be valuable if it in turn prompts a better, more
substantial idea.

It seems that when people say that execution is everything, part of
"execution" is to first take a vague, ill-defined, near-meaningless idea and
turn it into a well-formed, full-bodied idea.

~~~
philwelch
This is a Hollywood/James Cameron extravaganza--the mediocre love story and
CGI are just assumed. "Titanic" is, in fact, the complete and full idea behind
that movie.

Michael Bay tried the same thing with Pearl Harbor, but his execution was very
sub-Cameron. Also, there's nothing romantic about the Japanese bombing a fleet
in port. The Titanic is probably the best disaster you could do this with.
There's still the Hindenberg, but the target audience for these types of
movies would get distracted and confused by all the swastikas. So "Titanic"
wasn't that bad an idea after all.

------
CapitalistCartr
An idea that's the right goal or vision for me probably wont be the right one
for you. What makes an idea good for me is who I am. Pursuing a great idea for
making a better stove is probably not the right goal for me. But it was for
Fred Carl, who founded Viking Range.

Dreams, visions, goals are specific to the right people.

------
mynameishere
Here's the world's worst opinion on movie making: _here's the world's worst
idea for a movie: Titanic._

Can anybody name even a single, solitary reason--even _one_ \--why the story
of the Titanic could be considered _anything_ other than a fantastic idea for
a movie? The only thing I can come up with is "It's been done (successfully)
too many times already", but that actually disproves the general assertion. I
mean--it's up there with WWII and James Bond as far as great movie ideas go,
and yet, he says "worst"? Bizarre.

~~~
jdlegg
Show business, being primarily driven by the profit motive, tends to focus on
ideas to which an audience can relate and enjoy. The story of the RMS Titanic,
being one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history, is generally
antagonistic toward these ends because most (not all) people don't like
thinking about the possibility of dying on an ocean-liner and do not enjoy
watching it happen to others.

It should be clear how these two are in opposition. For this reason alone,
conventional thinking would call a movie about the Titanic a "bad idea."

The movie worked, though, and made a billion dollars because the director
executed it in such a way that it actually wasn't about a sinking ship and
people drowning, it was about _something else_. And this other thing (call it
the human spirit or what-have-you), overcomes the tragedy of the situation to
make it something the movie-going audience could relate to and enjoy.

From a more technical perspective, the Titanic story could be considered a
"bad idea" because, on the surface, the plot should hold no surprises to
anyone: boat sets sail, boat hits iceberg, boat sinks, passengers are drowned.

The remarkable thing about the Titanic film is that EVERYONE knows how it's
going to end, even before they sit down to watch it. This, according to
conventional wisdom, would be a bad idea as far as show business is concerned.
Who wants to see a movie like that? Yet audiences returned to theaters
multiple times. It is a credit to Cameron's direction that the film could
overcome such a large, inherent obstacle in the Titanic storyline.

~~~
mynameishere
The "conventional thinking" already produced numerous successful titanic
movies, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. They were successful without
Cameron's various flourishes, but that's aside the point anyway.

 _EVERYONE knows how it's going to end,_

Just as with every movie based on any war, any book, any real-life story, any
standard hero/villain setup, etc. In ancient Greek drama, almost every play
was based on well-known stories. So, the audience knowing "how it's going to
end" has been conventional for several thousand years, at least.

 _one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history,_

Replace "disaster" with the word "tragedy" and I think you can see how the
titanic, again, fits in perfectly with conventional, time-tested, subject
matter for dramatization. Maybe I'm missing your point, but many, many, many
movies are based on bad things happening to people. The worse, the better, in
fact.

Cameron's warping it into a chick flick has nothing to do with Adam's
assertion. It's not a question of 1000 million vs. 100 million in revenues.

------
mad44
"Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." I don't agree with the first
part.

Are you guys suggesting execution is mechanical? A good execution requires a
lot of ingenuity and creativity and taste. So there again, good ideas are
crucial.

~~~
jimbokun
Perhaps the correct phrasing is "Ideas without execution are worthless."
Ingenuity, creativity, and taste locked up in your own head and not executed
are worth nothing to the world around you.

------
mixmax
A lot of first-time entrepreneurs (me included) make the mistake of believing
that the right idea is paramount for success. As Adams points out that's not
true. It's getting old but it's still the truth: _Ideas are worthless.
Execution is everything_

~~~
ilcesco
I might be a rampant first-time entrepreneur wannabe, but I still believe
ideas have a little value. I'd rather say: Bad ideas are worthless, great
execution makes the difference.

------
kunjaan
I feel the author did not do a good job in defending the thesis of "Ideas are
worthless. Execution is everything."

I do agree that relying on the first aha-moment,however grand it may be, to
carry the entire weight of success is a bad investment. Similarly to throw
away an insight without analyzing it is equally foolish. Of course, you can
never predict if an idea will derive its entire value when thrown and mingled
with other external factors. However that doesn't mean that the idea itself
plays a small role in the success of any endeavor. Every execution step that
the author talks about requires coming up or at least using the so called
ideas. You need creative insights in every step of your project. This will
require the same amount of diligence in defining the purpose, testing the
hypothesis and maybe even jumping that leap of faith. The author needs to
clear the distinction between a conceptual idea and the execution of it.

Lastly, he has to mention the metric required to judge the success of an idea.
Since he envelopes every single Idea into one set, he has to have a parameter
to at least attest the value of them. I personally feel ideas as diverse as
Darwin's idea of evolution to an entrepreneur's idea of a company to an
artist's idea of an art cannot be lumped into one category.

I do agree with the author that ideas when defined without any context or in
isolation cannot be judged. But none of the arguments that he makes truly
discounts the worth of it.

------
JabavuAdams
Scott completely misses this important fact:

Some ideas (really collections of ideas) are easier to execute in one medium
than another.

Rather than some larger commentary on ideas versus execution the complaint
that "X wouldn't make a good movie" is usually meant in the sense that the
things that made X good in medium A would not translate well to medium B,
where B==film.

For instance I think it's perfectly fair to say that it's not a good idea to
make Lord of the Rings into a musical.

You may counter that the execution is everything, but I'd respond that if you
made a good musical out of the material, it wouldn't be LotR -- it would be
some vaguely related thing. It would necessarily lose some of the things that
make LotR great.

While I greatly admire Ed Catmull and his insights into teams, I don't think
his "good team will fix bad idea" comment is relevant here. Part of
implementation is choosing your implementation medium. Pre-specifying the
medium (i.e. let's make X into a film) is an _implementation_ decision.

It would be analogous to a startup saying "let's take this great system and
re-implement it, but it has to use technologies UVW". That's an
_implementation_ decision that may be badly flawed.

------
Sukotto

      You'd be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that
      it couldn't succeed with the right execution. And it would
      be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn't fail
      if the execution were left to morons.
      
      Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.
    

Words to live by. I often have to re-evaluate my own thinking because I tend
to fall into the trap of waiting for a better idea.

~~~
billswift
Theodore Rubin, in "Overcoming Indecisiveness" wrote:

"The Big Fact is this: In very few instances is one decision actually better
than another.

"In the majority of issues, almost any choice can be converted into a
constructive decision."

His point is not to waste time and energy dithering - it is the commitment to
making a decision work that is most important. Just substitute "idea" for
"choice".

------
Gormo
I'm reminded of the common argument that some proposed solution "works in
theory", if only the practice could be sorted out. But the concept of things
working or not working in theory is meaningless - whether something works or
not is inherently a question of practice. Outside of execution, there is no
way to assign value to a theoretical model.

------
Torotopo
Is Hamlet an idea? It has certainly been executed famously in a number of
different ways. Does a play not exist until it's produced?

What's the idea behind the Mona Lisa?

Of course, there's that whole sticky wicket of Platonic forms , in which the
object (the execution of the idea) is just a flawed imitation of the true
idea.

(But I hate to sidetrack the thread into a debate over materialism -- although
I think the mathematics point was spot on...)

Of course, in reality, Scott was probably a little frustrated that some fans
were shooting down a movie before they had ANY IDEA whatsoever about it -- and
here the rest of us spend our time debating his idea about their lack of an
idea. If ideas are worthless, what are ideas about ideas?

------
smithbits
There seems to be a bit of a strawman argument going on here. When people
share "their opinions on whether it was a good idea to create a Dilbert movie"
there's a fair number of assumptions tied up in there. It sounds the same as
the question "Can Hollywood make a successful movie out of the characters
created by Scott Adams?" Could the Hollywood studio system of the 1950's have
made Easy Rider? No, of course not. Adams makes some interesting and fairly
uncontroversial points about execution, but seems to do so on the back of a
misunderstanding. There aren't that many movies that Hollywood can make with
Dilbert, and most of them aren't worth watching.

------
chmike
I disagree with the author. Ideas are not worthless. It is just that execution
has a much bigger impact on the result. Ideas are like seeds. Without seeds
you can't get anything. But even with bad seeds one can get a good result with
good ground and good caring. And very good seeds can be spoiled. Ideas are
thus important, but not as much as execution. Considering them as worthless is
wrong.

------
Tycho
I'd say instead that the real value of ideas generally cannot be
known/calculated until executed. They are somewhat like prophecies. Only a
good track record will get people listening and willing to pay 'in advance.'
In the meantime your only hope is to capitalize on the idea yourself (and if
you're planning to do so, the potential value of the idea merits some
considerations of secrecy).

------
jrockway
_It will be called XKCD and have no discernable characters._

xkcd has characters. There is hat guy, Megan, Bobby Tables, Randal, and a few
others.

~~~
bliss
Even the main stick man character is the Author's own voice (or that's how I
read it). So that's the most prominent character. His "Dilbert" if you will...

~~~
bliss
And the mom and the girlfriend and...

------
blizkreeg
I run into people blinded by the idea fallacy every now and then and I can't
but shake my head. They'll tell me, I have this great idea for for you, but
you'll have to pay me or give some equity. And all I feel like doing is
vigorously shaking them.

------
c0riander
Good ideas have more room for error -- you can take a great idea and do good
work and still be successful. Bad ideas require greatness; you have to get it
just right.

I think it's the wiggle room that a good idea affords that people latch onto.

------
NewWorldOrder
Personally, I can't stand when people claim ideas are worthless and execution
is everything. The fact is that ideas INFORM flawless execution. Ideas and
execution are inextricably linked.

------
seanlinmt
"The value of an idea lies in its execution"

~~~
iworkforthem
Spot on! Whether it make or break an idea lie with the ability of the
entrepreneur and its team.

------
evanjacobs
Ideas aren't worthless. Ideas are plentiful. Ideas are made valuable by
extraction and refinement of the key elements.

------
jfornear
The "execution is everything" mantra is tired hyperbole. Of course 'the idea'
is worthless if it's nothing.

~~~
subbu
That's the whole point of the article. He is saying that in the context of an
idea.

------
ww8520
We should abolish patents.

------
statictype
On a tangent: Is XKCD really the most-viewed comic on the internet?

I wonder what people like Scott Adams thinks of it or whether they even get
it. He understands technology but XKCD is geeky beyond that.

~~~
pigbucket
Scott could be a Supergeek for all I know, but XKCD is typically aimed at the
lower rungs of the geek ladder. Even so I think it comes up with brilliant
ideas all the time, and succeeds despite the relatively mediocre execution.
(You have to use the words 'idea' and 'execution' differently from Scott to
see it that way, but that's part of the problem with an ill-defined opposition
like idea/execution)

