Don't Copy a Design — Steal It | Hacker News Reader

Don't Copy a Design — Steal It

usabilitypost.com

34 pointspuns10 comments

He's just rejiggering the words so that he has a good title. He could have just as easily said "don't steal a design -- copy it" and defined the words backwards, and the article would have worked equally well.

The concept is fine, but the wording is poor.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/copy-great-designers-steal

Another article I remember reading a while ago to elaborate on this.

Many people think smart designers spend endless hours just going through iteration after iteration of seeing what's good or bad. While iteration exists a lot in design, doing something entirely from scratch is like trying to write a program entirely in a native language, without any frameworks or libraries, and without any open source references to look at.

Design isn't as high of a competitive advantage (or really intellectual property) as it's made out to be. It's like trying to say an idea is more important than the execution, it's not. If you feel bad after "stealing" a design and improving it, just remember the famous quote by Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley:

Gates: Every car has a steering wheel, but nobody can call it their own.

Of course he was referring to the mouse, the UI, and much of the OS that Microsoft ripped straight from Apple (who in turn ripped it from various R&D groups at larger companies), whose own motto was "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Microsoft played Apple at their own game.

(who in turn ripped it from various R&D groups at larger companies),

Much of Mac influence was from Xerox PARC and the Alto. Fascinating history and a lesson that Xerox had it all and could have done so much more. PARC had so much innovation, GUI, OOP, Ethernet, and so much more.

...and postscript, leading to Adobe.

This immediately made sense to me - when you steal something, you make it your own.

That's an interesting way of putting it

I see what you mean: a copy is always in reference to something else. When possessing (a physical object), it exists in its own right, is its own psychological center.

When you steal something, the person you stole it from no longer has it.

This makes sense more to artists and musicians. When you "steal" a riff or a lick and make it your own, the person you "stole" it from still has it. I think he means stealing in this sense.

A copy ... remains one step behind.

True for startups too.

When imitators win, it is because they grasped the heart of the idea, and grasped/did it better/differently.

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