A few years ago I came up with a new and revolutionary idea. The idea wasn’t completely original, but I think that if I had had the resources (aka the knowhow and/or money) this idea could have blossomed into a very successful project. In fact, I’ve lived to see my project come to a partial fruition: The Mac App Store.

There were a few differences, however.

Slick Install would have been a cross platform collection of open and closed source software that could be used to search and compare software on your computers. On a PC the search terms “Word processor” or “Writing software” would have resulted in Word, Word Perfect, and OpenOffice, on a Mac the results would be Word (for Mac), OpenOffice, and Pages. People using the software would be able to compare price, features, etc. When they were ready to buy, they would simply click and it would be installed.

Slick Istall would have stored your library of software and in the event that your harddrive crashed, you could get back all of your software by simply loggin in and restoring. If you had multiple PCs, you could use your library to remember what software choices you had made in the past, you would need to pay the price of a second licence and then simple click and it will do all the work for you.

Slick Install would have provided the software at a discount (with the permission of the software vendors) but the application itself would have been free for any user. It would have made money by taking a portion of software sales.

If you don’t believe me, ask my brother, he is the only person in the world I have told until now.

I wish that I’d had the ability to provide this service a few years ago when I first thought of it.

What were your great ideas that you’ve seen developed without you? What ideas do you wish you could do right now? Tell me about them in the comments below.

I'd like to build an elastic scaling render farm service on AWS.
Mark Richardson on 2010-10-26 09:51:38.0