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Comment by Gpetrium | Hacker News Reader

>The reality is that if an idea is really good, the people who came up with it know it better than anyone and that gives them a tremendous advantage in terms of knowing what is important and what isn't.

I have to disagree with you emphasizing this point. If someone/entity manages to get your idea or code, they may be able to sell the solution at a fraction of the cost since their R&D was lower than yours. When the entity is 10x+ your size, they can also afford to gather the resources that increase their odds of success (e.g. marketing specialists, engineers,etc) at a rate which you can't compete. By then, you may have spent 2-3 years creating a business that is destroyed by an external entity acting in bad faith.

These things happen quite often.

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I tend to agree with the original comment, particularly for products that are still evolving.

We have a competitor who copies our features, but they don't know why we built the feature. The result is they end up copying the wrong stuff or tweaking the feature in a way that completely misses the point.

But, I agree with you in that creating a feature isn't an advantage in and of itself. Rather, it is the domain expertise that led to the creation of the feature that is the true advantage.

Try adding some random stuff that you get for basically free with your choice of backend / implementation.

This will waste their time if its a harder problem with their backend / implementation.

Another fun thing you can do is using something that looks like a 3rd-party service/API, but is really just another domain controlled by your company. Make it something specific to your business, so they'll be tempted to use it.

IF they use it, the least you can do is terminate their access at an inconvenient time. This will frustrate their customers as they scramble to do their own implementation.

Final thing you can do is not doing incremental updates, but instead doing big rollouts with many features at once.

That way they'll always be weeks to months behind you.

Basically, when someone is following you, mine the path to the point that it's cheaper and more effective for them to find their own.

Edit: Bonus round is talking about some near-useless feature on your dev blog that would be hilariously expensive and complicated to build, without actually building it. Hope they waste time on it.

>Final thing you can do is not doing incremental updates, but instead doing big rollouts with many features at once. > >That way they'll always be weeks to months behind you.

This reminds me of the old days when Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. I learned both apps, as each release from one would leap frog the other in features. I actually learned from a roommate that was taking college courses, and I would do his homework assignments. Not do them for him, but on my own just to learn the software. Saved me from needing to take the course!

Agree with generally not worrying about the competition — we were a little worried since a valley startup of ex-Big4 people cloned us 3 years ago, but they haven‘t managed to come far, despite a whopping 8MM seed round (we were bootstrapped).

This example however seems to play in a different league, the extent of ripoff here is absolutely staggering.

If I were OP, I‘d immediately call Daimler‘s PR department. After the whole dieselgate shitshow, none of the German automakers are out for the slightest bit of negative PR...

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/01/10/168588...

Apple is the perfect counter example here.

Apple wasn't the first company to make an MP3 player, but the generic term is basically 'iPod'.

Apple wasn't the first company to make a smartphones or touchscreens, but the generic term for a touchscreen smartphone is basically 'iPhone'.

Apple wasn't the first company to make a tablet, but the generic term is basically 'iPad'.

Apple didn't invent high resolution displays for personal devices, but the generic term is basically 'Retina display'.

We can go back in time, too. Apple didn't invent the mouse or a GUI, but lots of people pointed to the Macintosh as inventing them.

This has to be a regional thing, similar to how in some areas of the American south, "Coke" is a generic term for all sodas. But at least in my area (Portland, OR), what you're saying is definitely not true.

I've never heard someone use Apple trademarks as generic terms. The generic term people use for a touchscreen smartphone is...a smartphone. Likewise, a generic term for a tablet is "tablet". I've never heard someone use "iPhone" to refer to all smartphones or "iPad" to refer to all tablets.

Though as a kid, I know my parents would say to "put away the Nintendo" when it was the PlayStation stuff that was all spread out on the floor.

It doesn't really matter if it is a regional thing. The point is not that the name takes over. That's just a side effect that sometimes happens. The point is that the product that came second and copied the first now dominates the market.

How about the IBM PC? Plenty of home computers existed prior to the PC, but today 8086 code dominates at all levels of computing.

How about Google's search, or Google Maps? AltaVista and MapQuest came first.

You mention Nintendo and PlayStation, but Atari was before both of those!

How about Facebook instead of MySpace?

The point is that saying that the person who comes along and copies you will do it worse because they don't understand it is often wrong.

Where I grew up (borderline Midwest, generally associated with the South), it is common to ask “What kind of Coke would you like?” And an acceptable answer to said question could be “Mountain Dew”, “Dr Pepper”, or any competing soda brand. After I moved away from my hometown (though still in the general midwestern region) I found it fascinating how hyper local the nomenclature for soda can be (or rather “pop” or “coke” depending on where you live).

>rather “pop” or “coke” depending on where you live

I think "pop" is a hold over from the older English fizzy pop

We may be from the same place.

I feel like some of these examples could be US-centric phenomena. We in the US tend to confuse brand names with product categories, and in other markets the Apple brand doesn't have the same dominance in most of these.

I was going to make this point. While having a huge market share, Apple doesn't dominate in the EU, so generic terms are more common.

Here in the UK people just have "Smartphones" and "tablets" (tho I do hear people calling generic tablets "iPad" sometimes).

I wonder if in the UK the BBC's anti-branding guidelines make a difference; they will almost never refer to a phone as an iPhone unless it's specifically relevant.

I’d say this is by design. A major goal / win in marketing is when your market confuses your brand name with a product category.

The USA, love it or hate it, is the most dominant marketing force on planet earth.

The example may be US-centric, but that really doesn't invalidate the point of the argument: that late comers may come to dominate the market by copying others. I really don't need a global example or eurocentric example to make the point, but if you don't want Apple, take Google's Android, IBM'S PC, etc.

Edit: How about Google? They copied Yahoo and AltaVista, and their search engine has become so ubiquitous with searching that it's a word in the dictionary now.

At least the iPod/Pad/Phone stuff isn't US-centric - these are colloquially used to refer players/tablets/smartphones in many different languages.

I can hardly remember someone using an Apple(or any brand really) product name for the whole product category, it's rare in my experience. Sometimes there's a (grand)parent calling every game console "nintendo", but that's about it.

How about Q-tip? Band-aid? Adrenaline? Kleenex? There's quite a lot of them floating around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

Seems to be much more of a US thing. As a European I'd use the category name for most of those.

Some of the category names don't even match up - adhesive tape is definitely not what comes to mind for Durex for me.

The specific brands are usually country- or region-specific. It's just that you often don't notice the ones that have been genericized in your culture.

Consider: thermos, escalator, linoleum, trampoline, zipper, scotch (as in tape), jeep, xerox, jacuzzi, dictaphone...

>The specific brands are usually country- or region-specific. It's just that you often don't notice the ones that have been genericized in your culture

I think branding to generic really depends on linguistics of target market, brand writers and brand saturation in target market.

A brand name that is hard to pronounce is less likely to be used and how often do you think about the Slovakian pronunciation of your brand?

The US being a large linguistically similar market would be more susceptible to this.

I don't think any of those exist in my country. We do have some older people that call every PND a 'TomTom'.

Of those, the only one I would say that's actually fairly generic is ipod, but that's also the one that's been relegated largely useless as it's an "also" feature of everything else. I don't event here people refer to their non-iphone as an iphone, or their tablet as an ipad. People have have one of those might refer to theirs, and the class in general this way, but given they are actually in the minority of owners for those devices usually, I definitely don't hear it all that often as the generic term.

It all depends on the countries. FWIW, in my experience outside of US and other First World countries, "iPad" for "tablet" is by far the most common, and "iPhone" for "smartphone" is also pretty common. This is more typical of the older (roughly 50+) generation though.

Apple dominates a lot more in many desirable foreign markets.

> The generic term is basically iThing.

Are you from the US? Because here in .eu "iThing" is definitely not the generic term for pretty much anything.

Not the parent, but I am from the US. I don't know anyone who uses i{whatever} as a generic term. When they say iPhone, they mean a smartphone manufactured by Apple. When they say iPad, they mean a tablet computer manufactured by Apple, and so on.

I am also from the US, and I frequently hear (in decreasing order of dominance):

“Apple Pay” being used as a generic for “phone-based contactless payment system”, “iPad” as generic for “tablet”, and “iPhone” as generic for “smartphone”.

Mu kids called all tablets iPads at some point, so I had to teach them the difference between iOS and Android.

I'm a long-time Apple user fully baked into the Apple ecosystem and have friends and acquaintances in the same position, and I'm not sure I agree with most of those. Maybe "Retina display," only because Apple arguably was the first company to give that a specific branding term. I don't even think iPod was ever a generic for "MP3 player"; it was far and away the most popular MP3 player, and I'm sure the dozens of people who bought Zunes were tired of people saying "I've never seen an iPod that looks like that before," but that's not the same thing as being a generic term.

Beyond that, though, your other examples just seem weird, because I don't ever hear anyone use iPad or iPhone as a generic term. "I have an Android iPhone." "Hey, that's a cool Microsoft iPad." Nope. And the Mac was the first computer anyone outside of nerdspace ever heard of using a GUI and mouse, and I'm sure that's led to some pop culture confusion, but that doesn't strike me as comparable to the other examples anyway. "GUI" and "mouse" are generic terms.

> I don't even think iPod was ever a generic for "MP3 player"

It was generic enough to form part of the word "podcast", which has stuck around.

in your opinion though.

i've never heard anyone use iphone as a generic term. phone, mobile, cell, cellphone. these are the only terms i've heard.

and while i'm add it, mp3 player is what i've heard EVEN it is in reference to an ipod.

ipad? nah, generally i've heard tablet.

and finally, i've heard no one say retina, i have heard HD, HiDPI or 4k (even if it's not).

What I find a bit crazy is why don't large corporations do this more often? I literally told my manager when I worked at Corel that we should do this: Find a promising looking startup, clone their offering and blow them out of the water by virtue of the fact that we have 500 sales and marketing people with 20 years of experience (not to mention by being second to the market we can learn how to avoid all the legacy problems the startup endured). We were in a "new ventures" team and I figured instead of going along with cockamamie schemes dreamed up by our PGMs that had virtually no hope of success, we should enter markets that had at least some advance proven success. Nope. Not going to happen. We needed to build something that nobody had ever thought of before. While I can understand the idea, I still think its a massive mistake for an established company. Why enter markets where you can't play to your strengths (muscle)? I never could figure it out...

My theory on this is that small dev teams are an order of magnitude more productive than large ones, and most large companies cannot help themselves when it comes time to assign team sizes.

You can definitely win a war with superior marketing, but it's not a sure thing if your product is inferior.

Some SLC companies did pull this off well. I'm working with some Russians now that have teams that replicate US services for Russia, China, India and Brazil, simply with the idea of flipping them post-launch and pre-growth. They are getting rich, so it appears to be working.

Then can't you too find other investor for yourself ? You have the advantage being the one that come out with the idea to sell it to the investor.

Or heck pitch it to the same investor too.

No investor will get involved with a company that is presently undergoing major intellectual property litigation. IP lawsuits are the kiss of death for VCs.

Do you mean kiss of death for both Otonomo and smartcar ?

They should definitely reach out to the investor. But not before getting proper legal advice on the matter.

eyeroll

Investor: "Oh I wonder what other IP we can steal from them under the guise of due diligence"

At $55M in funding they won’t be undercutting anything - quite the opposite, they’ll need to turn a healthy profit or die.

At $55M in funding, they can undercut for years, since they won't need to turn a healthy profit for quite some time.

For example, Uber and Lyft. (Point being: survival is not just about the long run, but also the short run.)

Further to that point about undercutting for years, it's not going to be just $55m.

If Otonomo have raised ~$55m, it means they have very powerful, very rich backers (Bessemer, NTT, SK, Aptiv). They might realistically have another $100m over the coming years instead, if they continue making progress.

OTOH, if a company can only sustain its business model because it has the advantage of state protection, it necessarily means naturally defensible business products get less investment and artificially defensible business products get a bump. Which is better, is hard to say.

It should be clear however that patent and patent giving has massive costs on the state and a great boon to lawyers.

And at the same time, its still not enough, as you still need to do counter-espionage at companies anyway.

And this is exactly why software patents are not as evil as most people think.

They are being abused, but if you can close that loophole (prevent non practicing entities from enforcing patents), then software patents are critical to protect innovation.

Only if the software patent is really an innovation, not just restating something already known in a different way.

Patents need fixing from both ends - the enforcement end for non-practicing entities, as well as the assignment end, where patents are examined under harsher conditions.

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