Thinking different

I was just having a quick look over the posts on Y Combinator when I came across an interesting blog post by Paul Buchheit - he's the smart chap at Google that created Gmail.

He basically says that with any new product ideas you can put them into three categories : obviously good ideas that are hard to implement, obviously good ideas that haven't been done yet and bad ideas.

So we can take from that is it best to stay away from bad ideas....wrong!

"Instead of endlessly debating whether an idea is good or not, we should find faster and cheaper ways of testing them" (Paul Buchheit)

He gives an example at Google where they dismissed an idea as bad (video upload) when in fact it was a really good idea. He thinks, at best smart people only have a 50% chance of getting it right. I tend to agree.

So with most people staying clear of your particularly bad idea why not just build it and show that your idea actually has merit.

As they say a picture is worth a thousand words but a working concept can bring a "bad idea" to life.

I've been mucking around with Fireworks CS3 and Flex Builder 3, getting familiar with the typical workflow of putting together a very rapid prototype. As I'm getting more and more used to how MXML (the Flex markup language) works I am thinking that the cost of producing a beta product has got even cheaper, so not only can you show that your bad idea is actually good, you can have a working prototype linked up with a database and your business logic in next to no time.

So can we do even better? Well I know for fact that Flex Builder 3 is going to make this even easier in the next few months when they introduce the database connection wizard with CRUD tools (thats create, update and delete pages for the non acronym aware folk). So if you are just starting out your career or better still are at school or uni then start learning Flex 3 today.

At the same time as learning Actionscript 3 (which is based on ECMA script , so is Javascript 2) and MXML you can actually have some fun building stuff that works. Having a simple real world problem to solve is great while learning and you may find your "bad idea" pays your uni fees once you go live with it. At worst I predict you will have learnt one of the most sought after technical skills in the 2006-2010 workplace.