Surely. I think I'm a bit bitter from all of the would-be-CEOs that have a wonderful idea and just need the rock-star programmer to um, do the design, engineering, QA, customer feedback loop, product definition, you know, the actual work.

Let's take youtube; "I want to watch a video on demand". Really? What a brilliant 1920s style idea I've never heard before. It was how they pulled it off that matters.

What about an iphone/android? "I want one device that works as a PDA and a phone that does everything I need." Really? Never heard that idea before.

Every now and then someone comes along with a truly innovative and truly brilliant idea; and may God Help Their Soul.

I've personally suffered from being ahead of the curve many times. Or was it bad execution? In 2002, I had this AIM bot that you would send small messages too, then it would be posted on a website under your AIM name. You could follow your AIM buddies and see their messages.

Yeah, it's called twitter. I did it on top of AIM in 2002. In 2003 I did another bot that would proxy messages between anonymous users. Yep, you heard of that too, it's called Omegle.

Then in 2003 I did a multiplayer extension to an NES emulator that utilized DCC irc connections so that you could in an Fserve style, play random people well known games in IRC.

Sounds familiar? not yet. There will be a node.js/socket.io version of this soon by someone, I know it.

So yeah, even with novel ideas, I still think the 1/9/90 rule plays. In the 90 here is the very important element of timing, along with, of course, target audience.

So I'm not trying to brush off the necessity of true ideas, just trying to minimize the importance of it. Look around, many of the successful things that we use are totally void of true innovation (as in, I'm not using the First One). The desk I sit at, the monitor I use, the keyboard I type on. They are just decently executions of old ideas.