"Even Google, often touted as the canonical "idea" company couldn't sell their technology, even though they tried. They only created Google after futile attempt

"Even Google, often touted as the canonical "idea" company couldn't sell their technology, even though they tried. They only created Google after futile attempts at selling the idea to among others Yahoo." Yes, idea+execution is what matters. But, without the great idea, the execution doesn't amount to much, at least in the high-tech area (in the industrial/manufacturing/oil business, there is not much room for new ideas, so of course execution is the primary determinant of success) Before Google came out with their search algorithm, there were lots of companies trying to do search. I believe Altavista was considered the best at the time. What did Google have that all these other search engines didn't? Was it execution? I doubt it. A lot of very capable people were and are working on many other search engines, and yet none has the market penetration that Google has. What Google had was a much better algorithm, i.e. a much better idea on how to rank search results.