On: If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas?

[hymanroth]

Twitter's key insight was to extend a blogging platform to mobile phones (hence the 140 limit). It was definitely innovative and smart, but not the kind of thing they give out Nobel prizes for. I think the Google boys' idea went much deeper, and their indexing methods were completely novel at the time, hence much more relevant results.

[amichail → hymanroth]

Maybe they didn't foresee what this would do if they were concerned mostly about mobile phones at the time.

Perhaps you could say that twitter is an accidental success that is much more interesting than the original vision.

[raphar → hymanroth]

Google's way of indexing was not novel at the time. There were others that used the same methods. Their execution on the other hand was flawless.

[hymanroth → raphar]

Well, that's a matter of opinion. From what I have read, their method was innovative, hence the patents. The problem with working this kind of stuff out is that history is always biased towards the winners (in the sense that nobody talks about the losers). With that it mind, you could quite possibly be right.

[redorb → hymanroth]

If not their methods - their hardware was definitely a new thought at that time - Low cost commodity hardware etc; when it was cool to spend 10k on a server,