" In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS

" In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS)." Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows. I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage seems a rather large generalization.