How Hard Could It Be?: Inspired Misfires
Published February 2008
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEDespite the fact that continuous-aim firing was already in use in the British Navy, it took Sims years to persuade his superiors to embrace the innovation. Ultimately, he wrote a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt--who, surprisingly, read it, investigated the situation, and ended up promoting Sims to be in charge of target practice for the entire fleet.
The reason I love this story is that it's as stark an illustration as I can find that "seeming impossible" is practically a requirement for a truly great innovation. If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.
For example, eBay's original solution to the fraud and scam problem was a simple online reputation system. That system has grown to a department of 2,000 to 3,000 people working on "trust and safety," so it's probably no longer accurate to call the solution "simple." But from the very start, it effectively dealt with users' concerns about fraud.
What about the problem with wikis--that any kid could delete all the good work of others in a fit? This was true, but I hadn't noticed that wikis keep a complete history of every version of every article, so if someone erases or defaces a page, it takes about three clicks to put it back the way it was. Vandalism is a waste of time when repairing the damage is so much easier than messing things up in the first place.
eBay and Wikipedia are almost magical, huge successes--online monopolies, for all intents and purposes. That's not just because of the innovation, which anyone could copy (and many have tried). It's because in both cases, they have really strong network effects: The more people are there, the more people will want to be there.
Think of it this way: If you want to buy a Pez dispenser, you want to go to the auction site with the most sellers, because that's where you will find the biggest selection and the best prices. If you want to sell a Pez dispenser, you want to go to the auction site with the most buyers, because that's where you will get the most bids. In online auctions, the market leader has a huge advantage over the market followers. When Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) tried to get into the auction business, they didn't stand a chance. And the interesting thing is that Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft didn't try to get into the auction business until it was already too late and eBay's lead was cemented. Why? Because online auctions seemed--to them, at least--to be impossible.
The combination of "seems impossible" and "strong network effects" is about as close as you can get to the magic formula for incredible, sustainable success, as with eBay, Wikipedia, and Google. (People thought Google would never succeed because other search engines already existed.) You do have to be careful, though. All those crackpots with schemes of perpetual motion machines, unified theories of physics, and DeLoreans that travel in time while simultaneously converting toothpaste to gold happily regale you with countless stories about how "they said Galileo was crazy."
Just because they say you're crazy doesn't mean you're not crazy. Yes, things that seem impossible can be great innovations. On the other hand, they simply may be impossible. But on those rare occasions when you realize that something nobody thinks can work really can work--well, on that day, you just might change the world.
Joel Spolsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York City and the host of the popular Joel on Software blog.
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