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Comment by pessimist | Hacker News Reader

The article claims that this is the reason Russia has so little innovation. Is this really true though? Yandex is a great company. VKontakte is dominating social networking there.

Russian investors (or at least Yuri Milner) appear to be doing extremely well.

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The only innovative company in my view is ArtLebedev studio (which does all the UI/graphics design for Yandex and probably sole reason for their success) and most people who work there clearly see the same picture and hate it, albeit not as vocally.

Yuri Milner - CEO and Managing Partner of DST (Digital Sky Technologies) is doing well because DST invests heavily outside of Russia, namely they are one of the largest institutional shareholders of Facebook.

I wouldn't consider VKontakte to be much of an innovator, considering it essentially is a clone of Facebook.

Yandex = copy of other search engines (mostly google)

Vkontakte = direct ripoff of facebook

What's the innovation?

Having local search engines, mapping services, dominating webmail platforms and multiple social networks is itself an innovation. Innovation might happen when you have those, it would obviously never happen if you don't.

Few countries, mostly asian, dare to sustain that. Rest of the world can not.

Copying is innovation?

Innovation = new idea, new method, new product.

Sorry, your argument is bullshit.

Yes, copying is innovation.

I'm yet to see an example when a community proceeded with copying for an extensive period of time and didn't come up with innovations. Also I'm yet to see an example when a community didn't copy things already existing in the field. It's just not how it works.

E.g. Phonecian alphabet -> hebrew -> greek -> latin, cyrillic. Even hangul were drawing insights from both hieroglyphs and alphabets.

And, more often than not, "clone of X" means "tl; dr; but it looks like X". People seldom bother.

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