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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

This sums all that is wrong with business. A few original pioneers at the beginning and the rest are at best slightly improved copies as they require lowest energy to spend, yet boasting their awesomeness everywhere in order to sell.

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In India, Flipkart is often criticized for "copying" Amazon's idea (not that "sell stuff online" was revolutionary to begin with).

But the thing is, Flipkart entered the Indian market before Amazon.

As a consumer, I derived more value from Flipkart's "copy" that served me than from Amazon's "originality".

Same with Android. As a consumer, Android may have copied iOS, but Android's copy was far more affordable to me, and hence, I derived far more value from it than the original.

As a European and an android user, without the "copiers" most of those "original pioneers" would deliver no value to me, so I'm very glad the "copiers" exist.

Don't want your business copied? Make it available to everyone yourself in the first place.

What if the discovery process is risky and expensive? Protecting the idea is what pays the investors back.

I'd rather there be a few investors making products that I get to use than a lot of investors making products that I don't get to use.

I think the idea is that if you license your work for slightly less than the cost of copying, everybody wins. But if you refuse to license, it's a net loss. This model goes far but does break down as the ratio of cost of creation to cost of duplication increases.

This sums up everything right with business. Market forces drive technology to constantly improve as new products build on the ideas of the past.

- Business is not art.

- Even art isn't totally original.

Being a pioneer does not mean success. It is the execution that counts. The core business idea is important, but less than half of the whole picture.

Customers want iteration, evolution, and low-risk change. If every new product was a wholesale paradigm shift very few people would ever change what they spend their money on.

Nah. Customers want low friction and solutions.

Fact: NO ONE wakes up and thinks "I gotta buy me some iteration today."

Iteration, evolution and low-risk change are means. They are not ends.

This reads like so much marketing blurb. Opinion dressed as fact.

I would argue, but would not presume to state as fact, that the large majority of Japanese actually prefer iteration over radical innovation, almost all of the time.

This also reads like opinion dressed as fact

Would you argue that most businesses want to massively retrain their employee base every few months?

My work experience tells me that companies commonly put off major updates because of retraining costs and scheduling.

I didn't have supporting evidence for my opinion, so I explicitly did not claim it as a fact.

Please point out why you felt I claimed an opinion as a fact, perhaps I could improve my communication with your help.

But that creates companies like Behringer; they are right now in the process of cloning every single famous synthesizer that has expired IP, selling it for 5-10x less than the original manufacturers. This would obviously lead to market full of cheap clones (of course welcome by customers), but the original designers would end up on the streets or are forced to change their mindsets to cloners, likely in 20 years completely destroying the market. If nobody is taking risks in bold original ideas, there is no longer any meaningful progress, rent-seeking becomes rampant (we see it with the massive push to subscriptions everywhere already) and once creative exciting industry becomes stale and unappealing.

   If nobody is taking risks in bold original ideas,
   there is no longer any meaningful progress, rent-seeking becomes rampant

Seems backward, it's IP protection by law that is rent-seeking

Sitting on an idea indefinitely is not a good prospect either. Original developers knew that IP would expire and still produced original design. There're always risks, originality has some protection but so is availability and freedom of innovating at manufacturing, freedom to compete at costs. Original things can't be plenty if you can't base your work on something that someone made before. These synthesisers are based on complex previous developments, and those were an IP once. And surely those devs wouldn't end up on the street, that's ridiculous.

Look at what is happening with Gibson (sellers of CakeWalk, Oberheim etc.), how many bankruptcies/forced mergers happened in that space recently; now imagine getting a perfect clone maker to the mix, selling "legends" for cheap that might be good enough for 90% of users; the original idea people won't have any funding coming from their older works, some of them might risk it for some new idea that if not received well bankrupts them personally and they indeed end up on the street. It's happening all the time, we just don't like to hear about it.

Didn't Gibson profited enough from their acquired IP? Surely they have to compete at some point and not just own idea forever doing nothing but moving shareholders property. Most importantly, engineers and idea-makers behind original solution made more than enough profit since CakeWalk and Oberheim were produced. Poor Gibson can't buy right IP at the right time so they can do nothing and not make anything new - who cares.

>some of them might risk it for some new idea that if not received well bankrupts them personally

Owning IP exclusively forever doesn't change this at all. If IP is good then you can defend it for a some time to make profit on edge.

>It's happening all the time

Not with synthesizers/software/ee developers because of IP expiring too soon.

>now imagine getting a perfect clone maker to the mix, selling "legends" for cheap that might be good enough for 90% of users;

Imagine what all these people could do now! They could produce new innovative things.

Imagine Gibson was shit and would make shit new software that would cost as much as possible and own IP forever. That's easy to imagine because IP rights holders pushing hard for this change. That's sucks for everyone but Gibson since they get $ doing nothing. They cn also easily fire anyone involved in this innovation and prevent them from working with anything similar.

the original designers would end up on the streets

They've already made their money during the time they had the patent, so I imagine they'll not be on the streets in any literal sense. Also they have much more experience of successfully selling their product, so they could iterate to a new, better version.

Usually the main creative engineers that developed those products didn't really make big $, instead sold their companies before bankruptcy to bigger players that then made some bucks off them by economy of scale, product synergies etc.

Pioneers get killed; settlers prosper.

Pioneers die of dysentery.

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