Don't worry about people stealing an idea. | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry about people stealing an idea.

7 pointssabat11 comments

Quote of the Day from Google:

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Discuss.

It's true, that if it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

But do worry. Because the people who make money off of any invention are rarely the inventors. It's the people who brought it successfully to market. Did Bill Gates invent anything, for example? It's hard to make acceptance curve, but once you do, you want to be in the driver's seat.

Some people worry that if their product is very successful, it will be copied by the competition...

Why worry about a competitor that can only (try to) keep up with you by copying you? If you continue innovating at a rapid pace, by the time they catch up to what you have now, the distance between you and them will have only gotten bigger.

Unless they happen to be that special blend of better and faster, in which case they will out-innovate and overtake you. However, that probably would have been inevitable anyway.

I think it's a small risk to take to be able to go all out.

Reminds me of playing Warcraft II online.

At first, my strategy was to be as small as possible on the map so that maybe I can stay in the shadows long enough to maybe get strong enough to maybe eventually beat my opponent. My play got much, much better when I realized it's better to be strong even if it makes you more visible, because then they're screwed anyway.

Hope you'll forgive the lighthearted analogy.

>If you continue innovating at a rapid pace, by the time they catch up to what you have now, the distance between you and them will have only gotten bigger.

Big if. Few people or organizations are capable of sustained, on-demand, innovation.

So, yes, if you can pull that off, you're golden anyway.

There is no rules when it comes to business. just guidelines.

For example: Friendster was one of the leading social networks back in the day. They dropped the ball and there were 20 other competitors willing to pick the ball up.

If someone is copying then they don't understand the philosophy, the assumptions or the discarded options. The chance of being overtaken by an outright imitator is possible but small.

Hey! You stole that quote without attribution from Howard Aiken!

Woops -- that was an honest accident. Didn't mean to rob the Aiken of credit due!

It's true - what is there to discuss?

"Chuang-Tzu had it right. No more need be said. But such is human nature that the more succinctly we state the truth, the better we become at ignoring it. So, despite the completeness of the above homily, I'll proceed, hoping that my volume may insinuate into your worldview what Chuang-Tzu's brevity might not."

I think I like this quote -- especially the part about volume insinuating into worldview -- almost more than the quote it's referring to (http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/T...)

Heh, and it's directly in contradiction with what I said here recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117233).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com