Inc.com | by Joel Spolsky | February 2008
Why the most important innovations are often those that appear to be fatally flawed.
I could fill a pretty long book with all the stories of times I thought that an idea was stupid and could never work, only to discover that, in fact, it was pretty inspired. The two bad calls that I’m most proud of? That’s easy: eBay and Wikipedia.
I became aware of eBay in the mid-1990s, when a friend started using it to buy and sell comic books. I thought it was the stupidest concept ever. I absolutely could not comprehend why people would send money to complete strangers they had found on the Internet. It seemed that there was no protection against fraud and abuse, and the whole arrangement would become a hunting ground for scammers until it fell apart.
That turns out not to be what happened.
I had similar reservations about wikis, which I heard about long before Wikipedia was created. A group of programmers created the first wiki, something called the Portland Pattern Repository. When I heard about it, I thought I must have misunderstood something. Anyone can edit any page? What’s to stop some bored kid from deleting your whole website? I just didn’t get it. This idea obviously wouldn’t work.
There, too, I was completely and totally wrong.
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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.
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