I agree with your brother. Look at Google. They were not the first search engine, they were number 7 or 8. But they took a great idea (search) and added "high q

I agree with your brother. Look at Google. They were not the first search engine, they were number 7 or 8. But they took a great idea (search) and added "high quality implementation." End result = $billions and lots of happy users (myself included). I guess you could argue that Google's process itself was the novel idea -- that Yahoo and Altavista hadn't thought of link-counting and algorithm's and thus the novel idea is what allowed for Google's success. But then you might be getting into a semantics game. Or maybe this means you're both right. Maybe it's time I let somebody else comment.