Field of Dreams

Fairy tales and hero stories follow similar patterns: the good win, the bad lose, and people who do the right thing get prizes. These rules are pleasant, easy to remember, and have been with us as long as we’ve had stories to tell.

Applied to business, the myth that goodness wins is best captured in the famous saying, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” It’s sometimes paraphrased as “If you build it, they will come,” the iconic phrase from the baseball film Field of Dreams. Unfortunately, the quote is a misattribution to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading 19th-century american intellectual.

What he actually said was probably, “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, you will find a broad, hard beaten road to his house.” I’m not sure when you last sold pigs or grew corn, but Emerson had something other in mind than rallying would-be entrepreneurs to get in the innovation game. The phrase was meant to be poetic, not instructional, and he’d be disappointed at how many people have taken his words literally. The phrase has been used as the entrepreneur’s motto, misguiding millions into entertaining the notion that a sufficiently good idea will sell itself.

It’s not going to happen. These days, the best equivalent to the metaphoric mousetrap is “to build a better web site,” proven by the 30,000 software patents and 1 million web sites created annually. Certainly not all of these efforts are motivated by wealth or wishful thinking, but many programmers still hope that the “If you build it, they will come” sentiment is alive and strong.

And HTML5 and JavaScript are far from the best software development languages, yet they’re perhaps the most successful in history. Even today, right now, ideas of all kinds that experts criticize are gaining adoption.