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Copycats

mattgemmell.com

I stopped reading when I got to the 6x2 Android vs iOS comparison. In order:

The first one appears to make the argument that since the background images are similar colors, Android copied. But they're both nature scenes (one day, one night) and the sky really only comes in shades of blue... The author could be talking about the icon shape (square) but that's even more ridiculous since that's been the standard in desktop OSes for more than a decade.

The second one shows Gmail on the left, which looks the same as the Gmail web interface, and the iOS mail app on the right. The only similarities are the colors and the layout. The colors: Gmail had them long, long before iOS was ever released. The layout: Outlook did it first in the early 2000s.

The third: Two keyboards, both with white keys and a similar color background. However, other than the (standardized) QWERTY layout, the button placement is entirely different. Further, the Android one shows off Swype, something not present in iOS.

The fourth: Apparently the Android tablet calendar interface (I dunno, I don't have an Android tablet) paired against... I don't know. It looks like a third-party web app. It's definitely not a calendar.

The fifth: A third-party chat client paired against the iOS Facebook app. Neither of those are written by Google, Samsung, or Apple. Both are third-party. Fail.

The sixth: Uh, they're both black devices with an LCD screen? Them and every other smartphone on the market. Hint: RIM did black smartphones first, in the 90s.

You missed the point and should have kept reading.

The author is arguing that even though there's prior art for most of those things, and some of those are just too archetipal today, the SII would be radically different without the iPhone, given that the chances of this likeness being by pure chance are astronomically small. Whether you believe this is true or not is up to you.

The article contains a false choice between random chance and copying. There are many other ways it could have happened, such as multiple simultaneous invention, aesthetic choices that are in fact constricted by physical analogs, conventions, and prior customer experience. If you believe that the iPhone has hit a local maximum for design, why not believe that other manufacturers are hillclimbing toward them with the same algorithm?

"Copies never, ever achieve the success of the thing they copied."

Windows blatantly copied the Macintosh but in pure financial terms was a much greater success. Still, you need to bring some insight into the market besides "leveraging" your competitor's design. In Microsoft's case, they realized that by commoditizing hardware they could achieve immense market penetration.

Most of Shakespeare's plays are also (vastly more successful) copies of other works. The idea that copies aren't successful is rubbish. Ideas are easy--it's the execution that matters.

See also: Disney.

"Good artist copy, great artists steal" Anyone?

The "copied" ui elements are actually neither copied nor random. They are conventional elements predating both OSes. Such as the tab coloring in the spreadsheet which is from manila folders, the mail reading vertical panes from Outlook, the icons from Windows, and the keyboard, which is from the typewriter.

And that is where I stopped.

"Copies never, ever achieve the success of the thing they copied."

LMFAO. Suggested reading: Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422126730?ie=UTF8&link...

Not every cloner wins -- but the biggest winners tend to be just that.

There are lots of examples -- but an easy one is google.

Google didn't invent search engines, webmail, web advertising, or anything else that represents their core offerings.

They just did it faster, better, cheapter, etc.

     Google didn't invent search engines

A "search engine" is an obvious idea. Google invented a new algorithm for ranking items and made their system scale.

What Google shamelessly copied was the idea of serving ads to users based on the current context (search query or in-page content), which I think it's an idea that does have some value.

Also, in regards to webmail, the protocol itself has value and it's a true innovation. However, the actual platform used to build a client is not. Since the web happened already, a webmail interface was a natural progress.

The success of a product can't really be correlated with it being an original "invention" or a clone. Other factors are a lot more important, like quality of implementation (IMHO, the biggest one), timing, distribution and luck.

A "search engine" is an obvious idea.

Do you remember when Yahoo was just a page with links on it? Or the time before crawlers? How about when the default was OR queries instead of AND? The fun of having to search twice if your query contained the word "color," spelt with and without the letter U?

I'm sorry, but you just can't gloss over the above - which is a pretty meagre list at best - and say "that's obvious." If we always stuck with version 1, no innovation would take place.

There should also be a guide on how to copy without losing face, if only because losing face tends to cheapen your brand. Look how Apple copied from Xerox -- the underlying idea for the GUI was the same but the whole "look" was completely redone and customized, to the extent that lead even many smart people to believe that it was actually Apple who invented that interface. What Samsung's doing, on the other hand, is nothing less than slavish imitation -- they not only borrow the underlying idea, but also not even bother to make the product appear different on the surface (or they assume that by churning out products look similar enough to Apple's they can save in the marketing/design department, thinking along the lines of "oh hey, Apple's look/style is already 'in', so why bother inventing another one?"). There's copying, and then there's copying.

The first kind of imitation is due to one being forced to choose what's the absolute best out there. The second kind of imitation is simply due to one being cheap and trying to save bucks on design. That's a huge difference. A lot of people mix up these two ways of copying. However, the distinction between the two is precisely what is captured by the quote, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Stealing is done in a shy and low-key way so that nobody would notice, while copying, on the other hand, is blatant, slavish imitation. One has to know how to steal.

Sorry, I have no pity for those who slavishly imitate, though I do have a certain admiration for those who know well how to steal.

> Look how Apple copied from Xerox -- the underlying idea for the GUI was the same but the whole "look" was completely redone and customized, to the extent that lead even many smart people to believe that it was actually Apple who invented that interface.

I think it's not unfair to say that while Xerox invented WIMP as a concept, it was Apple who invented it as a consumer product. (After all, Apple didn't only customize it but considerably extended and brought their own ideas.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

I'm soooo tired of this discussion. Could please the whole gadget industry sue itself to hell. It's stupid. The arrangement of some buttons is not "innovation". Development of new wireless technologies (like UMTS, etc.) is innovation!

One thing i am really sick of: Go to the next walmart or what have you... Look at ALL the electronic devices. ALL! Now what do you see when you compare televisions, dishwashers, washingmachines, DECT telephones, receivers, every fking device looks the same, and for decades no sh*t has been given.

Really, i hope that Apple, HTC, Samsung, all of them sue each other into non-operation, let them not sell a device at all. Because somehow all of them copy from eachother (look at iOS5 notifications, as a counter example). It's a rather trivial design decision, not some livechanging invention!

Why is it that with all those new gadgets everyones first reaction is "oh fuck, i've seen this on device X before, it's copied, that's bad!"?! For about every of those design decisions prior art has been found anyway, it's NOT like Apple reinvented the whole electronic world with some "perfectly" aligned buttons.

Have you ever seen and used phones prior 2007?

Sure, and since you may have done too, you may remember that there was no such fuss about a phone looking like another, which is the point of my comment.

I also don't see how the "slide to unlock" stuff can be patented and sued on, there are (not only from Apple of course) sooo much stupid trivial patents, it's just sickening.

Hopefully someday the sue each other into "check mate", make no money and the world/countries see that the whole patent system has to be reworked from the ground.

Phones were ugly, they were not other phones knock-offs. They were WAY different: Nokia phones were slide phones, Samsung phones were different (similar to Motorola but way thicker)

They were not lookalikes, maybe sometimes vaguely similar, nothing more.

Also, just see the thumbnail image to recall how phones were in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uW-E496FXg

uhm.. yes.. first you say "WAY different", but then "..similar to Motorola.." and "..sometimes vaguely similar.."..

So what now.. the samsung doesn't look exactly like the iphone either, only similar (woohoo it consists mainly of a touch screen!).. Same thing for pretty much every electronic device as i said in the other post..

Asi said, this whole discussion is just stupid. Someone who can't tell the difference between phones and tablets wouldn't be alte to tell the difference between televisions or cars or whatever.. Only that for all other products nobody cares.

You do remember that a Samsung lawyer could not tell the difference between a Tab and ad iPad in a court, right? (thankfully a second lawyer got it right)

I couldn't tell the difference between most LCD screens from a distance, too. But i'm not complaining about it, either.

There is only few ways to make a tablet, which is essentially just a large screen. How should a touchscreen seen from front, off and from several feet away look like? Pink vs. Green?

Again: Ridiculous discussion, nobody cares for the rest of the electronic world. Why the obsession with shiny gadgets?!

I would bet that same lawyer couldn't have told you the make of any LCD TV at Best Buy if you removed their names either. Should all the flat panel TV manufacturers sue each other for copying because they all do shiny black flat devices with the same aspect ratio operated by a remote control? Or perchance they all settled on what works best for a flat panel TV design.

I did have a smart phone before 97, an HTC Apache in 95. It was a flat rectangle with a large touchscreen in the middle. So goes the evolution of hardware towards a common structure that works best.

> Think of all the iconic products and designs that endure, and remain incredibly successful, while dozens of also-ran knock-offs appear, wither and die on a monthly basis.

Bluuuh. "Think of all the X" just invites the availability heuristic. You immediately think of the products that became huge successes and introduced something new into the mainstream. Successful but boring products don't come to mind because they're boring, and the failed but novel products don't come to mind because you never heard of them. Averaged over the whole industry, I would guess that new products need a fairly small amount of originality, and adding more is correlated with failure.

If you want to be the best in your area, by all means go the extra mile to understand the problem deeply. But if you want to be good enough in 20 different areas, your best bet is to be a copycat in all of them, because originality is expensive and risky and your resources are not infinite.

There is one more reason that copying works is that people become disaffected with the original for whatever reason: poor customer service; failure at a crucial moment; finding out the price point of the original was not the best deal, etc. During the mid to late 1990's McAfee software made serious bank on this model.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Steve Jobs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

I think a lot of people miss the point of this statement. He's saying, good artists are inspired by the idea and want to copy it, while great artists understand the underlying concept and produce something genuinely original by stealing that concept.

For example, that HP Envy copies Apple's design, while the Macbook Pro, steals the underlying concept of the Macbook Air and reforms it in the context of a professional laptop. (Unibody was an innovation created for the Air.) Android is a copy, while Windows Phone 7 is an attempt to come up with something new by stealing the concept.

Could you provide an example outside of apple products, to make your distinction clearer? With the examples given, the difference is colored by my feelings about the companies involved.

It is best to understand the quote in the context of what Picasso meant. This article explains it well: http://www.businessofdesignonline.com/picasso-good-artists-c...

In programming terms:it's the difference between copy-pasting some code vs. extracting the core design pattern and using that.

An important part of a design is the tradeoffs/decisions that went into it, and how it adapts in the face of new circumstances. Copying the final result is a shadow of copying the thinking process.

The example that sticks out in my mind are the Sony NEX-series cameras. These are cameras with sensors far larger than most point and shoots, but also do not have the bulk of SLRs - high performance at a pocketable size. Sony's entry into this market came after the extremely innovative and disruptive launch of the Micro-Four Thirds format by Panasonic, Olympus, et al, which were the first products in the category.

But far from being a "me too" or a ripoff, Sony took the core concept and advanced it further. They put an even larger sensor into the machine without increasing the bulk, engineered a ground-breaking new viewfinder (generations ahead of anything Panasonic and Olympus had), and put focus into the camera's software that is unprecedented - focus peaking, touch-to-focus, etc.

Sony looked at a disruptive entry in the market, distilled it down to its core, and took it further than the incumbents. That is IMHO the difference between "copying" and "stealing".

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