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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: Microsoft Ads (the place you go to buy ads on Bing) is essentially a carbon copy of Google Ads in every way imaginable. The UI is, quite literally, exactly the same. The names of the features are nearly identical. There is very little differentiation, and it's 100% by design - doing this makes it very easy for marketing people to switch between ad platforms without needing to learn a completely new interface.

It's quite entertaining to watch. Google will release a feature, and then a few weeks later Microsoft announces the exact same thing.

Microsoft is learning that copying success is often easier than creating it from scratch. Making their products look identical to Google's makes it a lot easier to switch between the 2.

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They've always used copying as one of their signature moves, see zune vs ipod, win3/95 vs mac, early Internet explorer based on spyglass/NCSA mosaic, Novell eDirectory vs ActiveDirectory, C# vs Java, F# vs Ocaml, and many more I would have to think hard about and take a long time to remember.

They tend to enter late with a me-too product, whether they copy, acquire, or embrace-extend-extinguish, but copying does play as large a role as any of their strategies, none of which generally involve actual innovation and often lean heavily on illegal, underhanded, or unethical business tactics.

Please try using F# or C# for once and you'll see how incorrect this statement is. Both had huge amounts of novel work that influenced the whole industry.

This is smart and I don’t see anything wrong with it. They are familiar with malicious compatibility, though usually from the other side.

Props for one of the rare times they apparently thought a UI through.

Adversarial compatability is not a reason to mock a competitor to an entrenched monopoly.

I have no love for Microsoft, but the idea that a locked in monopoly, responsible for tainting or outright destroying huge swaths of the internet, is a "success"...

Not gonna lie though. Making a fake page that looks like a competitor to show people after they ask you to give them their competitors site is very mockable.

I see the similarities between these situations, but the difference is deception, Not that it's "copying".

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