re almost inventing things

[Mark Atwood]

Re almost inventing DVCS and almost inventing Linux.

I keep a notebook list of ideas that I know I had, that I didnt have the
interest, realization, drive, time, or skills, to chase and execute on,
that within a year or two later had burst onto the scene as billion dollar
VC funded "awesome tech".

One of my biggest ones was back in 2004, when at my workplace I hacked
together a HTTP interface to controlling Xen, that pushed around boot and
mount file system images via HTTP GET/PUT/POST.   If I had pushed that a
bit farther, abstracted it a bit more, and had been allowed by Digeo to
open source it, I could have "invented" cloud computing....

My lesson I take away from that is not that I am some special fount of
valuable ideas, but that nearly everyone who works in the right parts of
the tech space is, but that means little, as ideas are cheap, it's
execution that is valuable.

(This is also part of the cultural gulf between the tech innovation
mindsets associated with the US west coast (ideas are cheap, execution and
regulation is expensive), and the US east coast (ideas are special,
precious, secret, and dangerous.  However, execution is something you hire
"staff" to do, and lawyers are plentiful and free, since you already have
them on staff.)
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