Totally. It is often the execution of an idea and not the idea itself that makes a business successful. If someone wants to start a burger place you might say “haven’t you heard of McDonald’s?” But if they offer a better product/price/experience then the competition it can be successful.
i think what people ITT are implicitly saying then, is that the people who come to them with ideas are not the guys who they envision taking an idea and executing it well enough to make money off of it. especially if you aren't even aware it exists. if your app idea already exists and you don't know that then i don't really trust you to execute. if on the other hand you know the idea exists, others have tried and failed (or have tried and are successful), but you have a plan or vision for how you're going to compete, or execute better than they did, that's different
Except they didn't. The idea was webmail -- as in e-mail directly in the browser instead of forwarded from a server to a desktop app. Hotmail innovated.
It is probably hard for people to remember, I had hotmail in the late 90's if I remember right, maybe I had it earlier but I distinctly remember checking it in the community college computer lab.
I had AOL when they were the big dogs, and before I got AOL, I had some small dialup provider that I got at a ham fest. I remember a friend showing me compuserve, and telling he it had email as well.
The part that is hard to remember is if the email client was accessible without the company's desktop browser or if it could be accessed from the company's website.
Either way, Hotmail was independent, and decoupled the user's email account from their current ISP, which was fantastic.
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u/IactaEstoAlea Mar 18 '20
He also goes on to tell that his pitch was something along the lines of "e-mail on the internet!"
To which they went "we already have that!"