Ripe ideas

Sometimes I have an idea, only to find out that somebody else has already built it. Usually while I'm still sketching the logo. I know this happens to everyone. But it happens to some people in a more painful way than to others.

Take Carlo Matic. He once told me about his idea for a website where people could buy vouchers for local stores. Nice idea. It went nowhere, because Carlo was busy running his actual business, like a responsible adult. Two brothers, Fabian and Ferry, bought that very domain from Carlo and built that very business model. DailyDeal. Later sold to Google. Carlo got the price of a domain name out of it.

My former boss Uwe once built a tool that let you have a static subdomain pointing at a dynamic IP address. Back then every normal ISP connection got a new IP every 24 hours, so this gave your basement server a somewhat reliable presence on the internet. He programmed the client, he programmed the DNS server, and then he went to buy the domain for it. dyndns.com. Which was taken. By a company doing exactly that. He dropped the idea because, well, there was already competition. The competition did fine.

For me it was lemvista.de, my lyrics website. I was done and dusted with development and already had some traction, when a guy named Bastian from basc.de told me (not asked me, told me) to put a link to his website on mine. He was the original inventor of lyrics websites, you see, and I was just copying him. Sure dude. I told him to eat sand. Which he later did, when the music labels started sending Abmahnungen by the truckload for every copyright infringement they could find on his website. I'm not saying there is justice in the world. But sometimes there is a lawyer.

And then there is the one that still stings a little. In August 2004, I wrote an article here about versioning files and documents. Martzell and I had come up with it at a MacES meetup: don't just save the end result, save the whole way you got there, including the branches. Like a tree. There is even a drawing, see above. Eight months later, Linus Torvalds proposed Git. A tool that every developer on this planet now uses to do exactly this. Versioning. Not only the end product, but how you got there. (Btw. Apple tried to force the same concept on macOS users over the last ten years, with Versions in the Save menu. Nobody is using it.)

Did Linus copy our work?! Of course not. Linus doesn't read German Mac blogs. Besides, Martzell warned me in the comments back then that Kai Krause already held a patent on a multidimensional undo button. So technically, we both copied Kai.

What I wanted to say is: ideas get ripe. When the time is right, they fall off the tree, and whoever stands underneath catches one. Sometimes it's you. Mostly it's Fabian and Ferry.

Did you ever have an idea that somebody else came up with at the exact same time? Tell me in the comments. Preferably one that made the other guy rich.