Thinking app ideas are worth anything is naive. The nuance encountered while 'executing' dwarfs their significance. Anyone who has built anything knows this.
The faster we collectively realize this, the faster we'll be able to reign in the excesses of IP law.
lots of people are saying this here, I agree, pretty much, almost all the time, because almost all ideas are ideas that people have had. Especially when they are product ideas.
But on the other hand, whenever I hear this ideas are worthless, I do get a reflexive kick in my gut against conventional bullshit that everyone has agreed to believe in to fight against the old fashioned bullshit people used to believe, which was that ideas were valuable in themselves. And when I get that little reflexive kick in my gut I think, amazingly these people have never heard about pagerank.
I mean sure, without a good execution they wouldn't have anything, but the idea was definitely worth quite a bit more than "hey what if we made Yahoo, but improved the execution a bit?"
The faster we collectively realize this, the faster we'll be able to reign in the excesses of IP law.