Misko Hevery had an idea for Google!

At Google, he stumbled upon the idea of building a web app, a real framework for the applications.

The second keynote session at Spark IT 2011 here by Misko Hevery on 'How ideas are born and re-born, and re-cycled' was an inspiring one. At his job, as an Agile Coach at Google, Misko is responsible for coaching Googlers to maintain the high level of automated testing culture.

Idea is a journey

At the stage of Spark IT, he brought his experiences at the work place and talked in five basic points about the ideas. Starting with the first message, idea is a journey, he said, “If you have an idea, you have to nourish that idea. You reach to different goal with a different idea, but one has to continue working on it.”

Misko shared that an idea generally emerges from necessity. Like he wanted to create a database using HTML pages, in the process he observed that he could take the User Interface (UI) and put it on server, and so he developed the new idea of building database on the cloud, while the primary idea was to build UIs using HTML.

Ideas are often recycled and improved

Taking an example of the browser that existed since three decades from now, Misko said, “Initially we used to have terminals. The entire setup comprised dumb terminals, rich/fat clients and expensive mainframes. Then came the era of personal computers, where we had cheaper PCs, dumb terminals and still expensive servers. The companies came up with the ideas of applications. They have the browsers of today that are really heavy. When you open a Gmail, you download a host of codes making it a really fat client.”

He added that a lot of innovations have happened in these 30 years, while the UI of a browser is very user friendly, only qualified computer engineers could work on the terminals.

Ideas can be sold but not stolen

In a very succinct fashion, Misko delivered a key message that as a journey, idea becomes successful if the entire journey goes well; one can know the destination by stealing it, but not the route of the journey. He added that one of the major obstacles is selling the idea to your bosses or to venture capitalists. The significance of a journey cannot be understood there. An idea helps in defining the vision, which marks the goals and identifies the obstacles.

Ideas are cheap, execution kills

A very valid point that Misko made was that ideas are easy; what is difficult is the execution and delivery of the output. A lot of venture capital firms do not fund the ideas, but the process, the person who knows how to get there and his vision. Looking at the details is a very difficult but crucial part.

Giving an example about the iPhone, Misko shared that as a product from features point of view every product is the same – be it an iPhone or a Blackberry. But the selling point for iPhone was the attention to details.

Lastly he suggested that while on the journey of achieving the goal following that particular idea, one should make the easy jobs into very easy one, then he could make harder jobs easy ones. He shared that at Google, there is no secret mantra for its success, it is just focus on execution and belief in the capabilities of its people who makes things done.