After his pre­sump­tion that both eBay and Wikipedia would never go main­stream was proven wrong, Joel Spol­sky realised what he calls “a fun­da­men­tal les­son about the nature of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion”. For Inc. Mag­a­zine Joel describes his idea that the most impor­tant inno­va­tions are often those that appear to be fatally flawed.

[…] “seem­ing impos­si­ble” is prac­ti­cally a require­ment for a truly great inno­va­tion. If some­thing seems pos­si­ble, that’s prob­a­bly because some­one is already doing it. When some­thing seems that it can’t pos­si­bly work, nobody tries it. Real inno­va­tion hap­pens when some­one tries any­way, over­look­ing an obvi­ous flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work. […] On the other hand, they sim­ply may be impos­si­ble. But on those rare occa­sions when you real­ize that some­thing nobody thinks can work really can work–well, on that day, you just might change the world.