Certain Habits

There’s an old joke about economics. “An economist is walking down the street. He comes across a dollar bill laying in the road. He decides to walk on without picking it up. Why? Because if the dollar bill was really there, someone would have already picked it up.”

Yeah, I know. That’s more droll than funny.

But reading about Inkling, a company that was builds technology that will enable textbook publishers to adapt their content for use on the iPad, I think that it’s not just economists who see competition that isn’t there.

MacInnis says he half expected to be surprised at today’s Steve Jobs show by the unveiling of a competing technology. But for now Inkling is the only game outside the book publishers’ own much less advanced CourseSmart e-textbook format. “I think no one else did it because everyone else thought everyone else would be doing it,” he told me. “Nope, looks like it’s just us for now.”

The lesson? If you think you can take fill a need in the market, go fill the need in the market as well as you can. Don’t let hypothetical competition deter you. Who knows? You might find yourself with the market all to yourself.