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Comment by danielharan | Hacker News Reader

"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...

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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...

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> Apple has a license from Xerox.

I know they do. This little fact is interesting, but my argument was general. Because Apple still customized the hell out of the interface -- if anything, the fact that they did have a license and didn't really need to do any of the customization (except to reduce costs) only reinforces my point.

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