Anyone can think of ideas. I'm sure we've all got entire documents with lists of ideas we never followed up on.<p>The hard part is finding opportunities to create value for others (making stuff people actually want). Generally speaking, people already have the stuff they want that they can have. Now, I'm sure Paul Graham would say people's desires are infinite and there's still many unmet needs and wants. For All the stuff they don't have but want: well, there are major barriers to entry for those business ideas (flying cars), the exception being those ideas that were just recently enabled by another innovation (a Rare treat indeed). I think we've had this conversation before....<p>And, as he said in another post: you've got to be at the forefront of any industry. Live in the future. Meaning, use the latest tools and gizmos of any particular industry in order to help understand where things are and get a feel for them.
I actually think there's still potentially room for a new phone OS, though maybe only just barely.<p>iOS is in dire need of new UX patterns. Take the text selector for example, which felt like a stopgap when it was made and hasn't been changed since its release. There a ton of papercuts like this in iOS.<p>I don't use Android regularly so I can't speak as much to its weaknesses, but I believe there's a lot of room for improvement there as well, e.g. app discovery and distribution<p>There's a photo floating around of Paris Hilton holding 5 phones. It's comical but I think it also shows what's lacking. It'd be great if phones had sandboxed profiles, completely isolated from one another in true multiuser fashion. There are a lot of opportunities either for greenfield ideas or adopting existing computing ideas to phones. You might find at least enough market for a niche use capable of supporting a small to medium business
I'm deeply skeptical of anyone who wants to start a startup. I'm very respectful of people who have great ideas. One thing about <i>startup first</i> is that it ends up with a lot of duplication. Granted Google and Facebook were duplicates. And so it's fitting that they are in essence aggregators.<p>But I'm an engineer (and not a VC) and I have a natural inclination towards the Woz approach. The magic happens in the process of work. It doesn't happen in office hours at an incubator.<p>I think a more useful article would be <i>Ideas For Founder Teams</i>. But that's some hard thinking.