Bill Gates had it easy

Flying on the airplane the other day I was trying to think of some cool ideas for software that would already have been developed 10k times over… Then it dawned on me; Bill Gates had it easy.

Back in the early 80’s, it seems to me that it was rather easy to come up with a unique (truly unique) idea in personal computers. One could argue that because graphical user interfaces weren’t common that it would be hard to imagine something so futuristic as google… But, never-the-less, it seems to me that there was SOOO much room for brilliant software inventions.

Now, when you try to think “what could I make that no else has?” you’re left stuck with ideas like

  1. Eye scanner (with some AI) that detects rapid eye movement in combination with mouse clicks to eventually replace mouse-clicks with simply looking at the screen
  2. Windows modification that changes the position of shadows and the over-all ambiance of windows, buttons, etc. based on the location of sun-light within the room.
  3. AI-based program that monitors general interests over time and displays news-worthy events based on established interests.
  4. THE LIST GOES ON…

WTF! Not only have all of those ideas probably already have been thought of by someone at MIT, but I couldn’t imagine the education I would need to accomplish them, much less the time or funding.

A while back a guy made some stupid little game about farting… Now of course, when you search online for “fart game”, instead of getting the one single game you would expect to see, you get dozens of remakes. Who would have thought that a game about farting would be such a big hit. The guy apparently sold thousands of copies virtually over-night, making him a ton of money selling the stupid thing at a couple bucks per copy. That’s the brilliant idea that I want to come up with. A stupid little idea that no one else has thought of that would be super easy to make. Unfortunately, those ideas aren’t quite as common.

It feels like I have missed the mark on all of the good ideas. 12 years ago, when I was programming for a hobby still, I had a brilliant idea to build a re-usable website that could have modules in it that did different things for different different needs, and had a desktop client that allows you to integrate with your website so that you could manages inventory, products, page contents, etc. from the desktop in a cache (draft?) type fashion. Then I got picked up by the workplace and couldn’t continue my little project while working a full-time job (so I felt). A short while later, out popped WordPress and Joomla. Looking back, I should have toughed it out and just finished the damn thing!

Good ideas in the technological world are hard to come by any more. When you finally do find something that someone else hasn’t developed, the idea is too complex to actually develop (involving too much time and money). I feel like it is comparable to imagining the 10th dimension. We have a hard enough time imagining 4 dimensions, much less ten dimensions. A cheap, easy-to-develop idea is like the 10th dimension.

So, my point, is that Bill Gates had it easy. In the dawn of the technological era, how hard was it to imagine that there should be a visual interface? Then again, playing devils advocate, with the lack of technological development, maybe a visual interface to computers was the 10th dimension for most of us… I’ll assume that’s not the case though and just continue with the anger of how easy it was for Bill to imagine something that hasn’t been done in this industry yet.

Surely there is plenty of debate on the topic; but one I don’t want to hear about is how Bill stole the idea for a GUI from someone else. Whether he came up with the idea on his own (which I don’t believe he did), or he built on the idea and made something better (which I believe he did), the fact is that what he rolled with revolutionized the industry.

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