1 2005 |
We drive to Wisconsin a lot; usually twice a month. That's a 8-hour drive each way, resulting in a lot of chit-chat time. Since we're in business together, that's usually the topic. We'll fill pages of notebook paper with random thoughts, wild brainstorming, and detailed notes on this and that.
Over the past two trips, we came up with something that could change the face of the internet, but I'm not prepared to talk about it yet. It's all full of XML and ecommerce and the web and software clients and fun stuff.
The most amazing thing is: it won't make us a dime. There's no profit for us in it. If it does turn out to change the face of e-commerce, it could add to our online sales, but other than that, it's really no advantage to us...
...except to know that we give something new to the online community. Like the Napster guy, or the Google inventors, or Linus Torvalds, or Tim Berners-Lee. Or all the people who came up with network standards and white-papers that were never adopted, or brainstormers that came up with impractically great things that never saw the light of day.
Most of our business stuff lights our fuse because we've figured out profitable business models. This is different -- it's the satisfaction of invention, and nothing else. It's talking about the theoretical, over and over, until there's too much practicality to pretend it's a theory. It's fantasizing to the point of creation, then getting out the hammer and nails and doing it, simply to get it done. It's carving away everything that's just a block of marble, leaving only the beautiful woman's figure in place. There's an excitement in creation for creation's sake, and we're feeling it. Even if it turns out that our idea sucks, we'll still have created something that started as a vague concept. Creation is the fun part.