> the more it just looks like right-place-right-time luck
That's confirmation bias. There are tons more people than you know of in the right-place-right-time, but couldn't/wouldn't act on it. You still have to build the start up and be persistent at it, have the right vision, do the right adjustments when competition comes around. These are also features shared by the Microsoft / Google / Apples out there.
It's not an either/or: almost every successful company requires both hard work and luck. In very rare cases one or the other might be sufficient, but in the vast majority of cases both are necessary. The amount of luck required can be reduced by hard work, but it can't be taken to zero.
In the usual case, picking a product that turns out to have high demand is the biggest area where luck matters.
There are two kinds of high-demand products: the things that everyone wants but no one knows how to do, and things that no one knows they want but everyone knows how to do.
Fractal image compression is a good example of the former.
Almost everything else is a good example of the latter: smart phones, Facebook, Twitter.
There are some things that are both: the Model T ("If I'd asked my customers what I wanted they would have said a faster horse") and so on.
If you choose one of the former, the odds are you'll fail because if no one else can do it, you probably won't either.
If you choose one of the latter, the odds are you'll fail because if no one knows they want it, it's probably a stupid idea--which is often a smart idea whose time has not yet come.
This is not to say you shouldn't go for it! "The odds are you'll fail" is a simple statement of fact with regard to starting a business, but only for certain values of "fail". You'll learn a huge amount, grow in ways you never knew were possible, and have the adventure of a lifetime. Just be really, really careful about not getting wedged financially, and especially make sure you don't let friends or family members over-invest.
I'd question whether 'everyone knows' how to do smartphones, or social networking, or any number of other innovations. The winners in these fields prove the opposite - hardly anyone knows how to do these things well enough to keep growing a customer base.
I still find an inexplicable number of startups apparently unaware of the critical importance of market-building and networking.
A poor product marketed well will always outcompete a better product marketed badly - or not at all - as long as it has acceptably basic functionality and isn't completely unfit for purpose.
There are so many examples of this in tech it's baffling that it doesn't seem to be considered more often.
And I think the article is just plain wrong about innovation, because in fact there's a constant stream of possible new innovations. The stream comes in waves, but anyone who isn't thinking about what's going to be possible soon isn't paying attention.
'If it was possible someone else would have done it by now' is a Dilbert argument, not one based on evidence.
What doesn't exist is a constant stream of opportunities with instant Apple/Google/FB/MS earning potential.
But these corps got big in many steps, which included choices about products and services, marketing and ecosystem building, customer lock-in, brand management, investor relations, management culture, and worker culture.
They didn't just make a thing and instantly kill the rest of the market because it was just that awesome.
The more qualifications you pile on in the competence vs. luck equation, the more it looks like just luck. And the more it looks like any other field where many enter and few win.
The market selects for increasingly subtler and harder-to-attain qualifications, and while you could conceivably stay on top of what the market is looking for through careful reading of history in the short and long term, time spent doing this is time not spent preparing for actually starting an enterprise. The people who do succeed seem to only read history after the fact.
That's confirmation bias. There are tons more people than you know of in the right-place-right-time, but couldn't/wouldn't act on it. You still have to build the start up and be persistent at it, have the right vision, do the right adjustments when competition comes around. These are also features shared by the Microsoft / Google / Apples out there.