Ever have a great idea....

And find out it's already been done, and some global company is making millions off of it?

Where I work we have a huge mainframe batch system. My idea was to use the files and everything in the system to document it, starting with the schedule. First I'd parse the schedule file and create a nice interactive flowchart layout of it. The extension to this aspect of it is hooking into the mainframe and monitoring the execution of the schedule in real time so that when jobs/pgms complete on the mainframe, you can track them on the desktop gui application and fix them when they go down.

The other aspect is using the system layout to 1) research the relationship of pgms and files in the system 2) train new people on the system and 3) document the business processes.

Well, These people have already done all that.

It's good to know that I had a good idea, and it's even good enough to run a world wide company. But its frustrating as hell because, has everything been thought of already?!?!

Yes, but throw some pink feathers on it and call it your own...

Don't forget that people who're super-successful aren't always so due to being uniquely gifted. They're just in the right place at the right time.

Everyone knows its easier to get investment money if you copy a successful idea.

Copy it. Make millions.

Especially if you do it better and cheaper.

SIMPSONS DID IT!

There was some guy in Roman times who lamented "There is nothing new under the sun" and some other guy who mentioned there's nothing left for physicists to do other than get a few more decimal points of accuracy while others studied the mysterious emanations of uranium.

And then they sue you for patent violation.

Everything may have been thought of already but who cares? Other ideas will come along. Just keep up the thinking.

I had such an idea once:
We all know that tv commercials are worth amazing amounts of money. Where does that value come from? People who watch them, of course. Currently, a company pays a tv station for airing their commercials, and the tv station fills the gaps with material they hope a lot of people want to watch. This costs money. So my idea was: Why not get rid of the expensive tv programs and pay viewers for watching ads 24/7? The tv station makes more money because they can air 100% commercials, and commercial time becomes more valuable because people really watch (this would mean that there needs to be some sort of a control mechanism, maybe random camera surveillance or something like that). And the money saved on buying expensive tv shows can be spent on the people who watch instead.
Unfortunately, a German comedian had the same idea a few years back.

I once had this great idea for computing angles. I think I was twelve or so when I was measuring the height of the sun (in degrees) by measuring the length of the shadow of a nail in a board of wood, redrawing the triangle on a piece of paper and measuring the angle. It occured to me that I could construct a table of shadow length as a function of the angle, and not have to keep drawing triangles all over again. I thought this was a neat idea, but I never got round to making that table. A little while later they told me about tangents and trigonometry.

If you really have a good idea, chances are that someone else has had it too. There are exceptions, of course, but it is often the case.

A good idea is often no more than picking up what's already there and putting it together in a way that seems very logical and straightforward afterwards.