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Comment by pascalxus | Hacker News Reader

just look at how successful a business that is, so simple, so little innovation and yet so much revenue. But despite all that, they have the best feature (X factor) in the wolrd: market timing.

ohhh what i wouldn't do, to time travel back to 1995.

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If you are going back, just buying stocks and sitting back would be easier than building a business. Almost guaranteed to be the richest person by 2017.

What's innovation have to do with it? Sounds like someone has convinced you that things have to work a certain way and you've found your first counter example...

It's a broadly held belief by many. It's good to look at craigslist to see how simple solutions are all that's necessary. Any yet, too frequently, we see companies spending soooo much money on useless features and so called innovations that don't help them solve their problem. This happens for both failing companies and very successful ones too. It can be difficult to isolate, exactly why something works, when you have so many confounding factors.

Actually, this day an age where all the simple problems have been solved, we're especially susceptible to this line of thinking. As entrepreneurs, we all know the saying: "It has to be x10 better than the existing product". Without new problems to solve, increasing desperation mounts, culminating lots of failures where a product is supposed to be x10 better.

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