Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original
bradgessler: I don't really think ideas are worth that much. Anybody can come up with an idea. What is, "I have an idea to build a fusion power plan to supply all of the World's energy," worth? Not much.The value of any idea is the execution of that idea. In the world of software its the implementation of that idea. If your competitor has done a kick ass job implementing the idea you thought of and you really don't think you could do a much better job, I would probably look for other ideas that you feel you could do better.Another thing to look at is the capability, velocity, and momentum of the competitors idea; you may be able to out maneuver them if it took them a long time to get to the point they did and they suck at software development. If they are kicking ass and getting funding to add more resources and move faster, this could make your life harder.That said, don't do a feature-by-feature copy of the competition. That adds absolutely no value to the world and you're going to have a hell of a time escaping their shadow. Plus it would make you a slimy person its just really bad PR.One of our competitors is copying us feature-by-feature and it actually puts us to an advantage because they don't understand why we did what we did and our software development delivery is much faster and higher quality than theirs.How do we know this? Just by looking at their web page source. They have all of this test javascript code and fixtures mixed in with their production javascript, they use tables to control their page formatting, left /phpinfo.php on their root web server, use Dreamweaver to code their PHP and image roll-overs, and push everything out via FTP on port 21. Who the hell does that? On top of that they haven't delivered any new features in the past 4 months.At the end of the day, very rarely are ideas original. You're better off focusing on the execution of an idea and out-delivering the competition.