Wil Shipley on "Success, and Farming vs. Mining"

Insightful piece on the software business, on steadily building something up vs. trying to make a quick buck:

Your idea sucks. No, I’m not calling you stupid — my idea sucks, too. All ideas suck, because they are just ideas. They’re worth nothing.

My success is because I worked to make the idea real. A lot. All my life. Starting when I was 12, I learned to program, and I’ve programmed every spare moment since. I didn’t become a millionaire until I’d worked at it for eighteen years. There was no genius idea I had. I just kept working, hating what I did before, and working some more to make it better.

The idea part is cheap. Try to think of an idea that’s actually worth something on its own. “I wish I’d thought up the web browser.” Bullshit. The web browser had been thought up at least twenty years before those high-energy frogs coded one up on NeXTstep (c.f. Dynabook, 1968). It was the actual shipping product they wrote that caused the internet revolution, not the idea.