Totally made up and arbitrary example but it would be like if Starbucks started serving some widely popular menu item based on a recipe from a competing chain. They already have a huge loyal customer base that's coming into their stores all the time, so it's more convenient for these people to get this new item at Starbucks since they're going there anyway, but Starbucks didn't come up with the idea or recipe, they just saw that it was popular elsewhere and knew they could leverage the convenience factor to get people to buy it from their stores (which people were already coming to) instead of going to a second store for it. That's not really ethical competition.
Is this really fair to you? Big Company A stole your invention and leveraged their market power to basically shove you into a corner and out-produce you, but if it weren't for your original idea, they would have never done any of this. It's the concept of a company stealing an idea/invention from someone else and using it to profit themselves that doesn't sit well with me.
Take for instance Google Plus, clearly a clone of every other social media. But it didn't work out too well. Facebook on the other hand was a copy of other platforms as well but well executed. Plus can Snapchat still be considered a small company, I guess in comparison to Facebook sure.
Yes, that's perfectly fair to me. That's how competition works.
The world would be a dark place if nobody copied other peoples' ideas and made products/better products out of them.
I have a feeling this will change eventually.
I'd have to think there isn't a legal case or the billion dollar company that is Snapchat would have mounted a case. They didn't patent an interface (code or visual). They didn't try to protect it or even make a public case that it was somehow copying.
Yet, here we are on Hacker News saying it's somehow unethical? At this level, all social networks are "clones" of each other. Twitter is a clone of the FB news feed. Android is a clone of the iPhone. All of the food delivery startups are clones of each other. They all should do the moral thing and close up shop or at least pivot to something else.
Except we would all be poorer for it. We would have less options, less innovations and fewer ways to communicate. If any of the parties thought this was unethical stealing of their work, they are big boys and well funded; they'd at the very least say so.
You may not like FB/Instagram because of it but, if it's a superior free product and no one is making a case then I don't think it's immoral.
Yeah and it only took 5 attempts.
(Poke, Bolt, Slingshot, Flash, Instagram Stories)