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Comment by sida | Hacker News Reader

I might be at odds with the crowd here. But why wouldn't you copy (especially if you are in an environment where you can get away with it)

Isn't "copying" / "cloning" the greatest hack of all? Billions of dollars have gone into the design of smartphones. Why would you go and invest more and play the catchup game? in something that established players are very good at?

The innovation of xiaomi is not in smartphone itself. But how it is manufactured to achieve such value and the process which it is sold.

So if I put it in terms that startup people that find acceptable: cloning apple is just an great bootstrap mechanism. They are hugely profitable on the back of apple's marketing budget.

If they achieve greater prominence globally, they inevitably will have to innovate on the phone itself, but then they will also have the budget to do so.

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In the pro audio world, this very scenario has unfolded over the past 10 years or so. The Behringer Corporation got their start by cloning the designs of manufacturers like Roland and QSC. One could read a great deal of contempt for their strategy on enthusiast message boards; indeed in the beginning Behringer's quality may not have been outstanding, but their prices were superb. Behringer managed to bootstrap themselves through this process of copying the designs of their competitors; eventually they became large enough that they bought up many of their competitors and are now making a great deal of money on new designs of their own, like the X32 Mixer.

Something smells funny about doing business this way, but although they are certainly not a beloved brand in the industry, I suspect that within 10 or 20 years their consumers will have mostly forgotten about their dubious start and will consider them like any other brand. I'm not sure what the takeaway is here but its an interesting case to study.

While cloning makes sense to an individual actor, it has a harmful effect on the market overall. If cloning is rampant, then innovation is discouraged. Why spend the time and resources to find things out for yourself when you can just wait for some other schmuck to figure it out and then copy them? Of course as this process continues, there are fewer and fewer schmucks who will feel the need to create thoughtful, carefully-considered products.

Copying can be discouraged through legal means, but the results are usually unsatisfactory (witness our ongoing strife over technology patents). A culture where copying is viewed as shameful has the advantage that most situations never need to devolve into actual legal action. Companies will voluntarily avoid copying one another (in an obvious or crass manner) to avoid damaging their brand.

> But why wouldn't you copy

Because of pride, especially if you love your work

In what other context does pride preclude using others' works? Certainly not in Science, Mathematics or Engineering. It's the right thing to do in most other contexts - you stand on shoulders of giants.

I don't know I just feel that attempting to photocopy something because you lack passion and you're too cheap to spend time and money on r&d is different from using someone else's work (that they've shared) to make something better. It's the difference between doing something to get rich and doing something because you love doing it, and making something big; something worth being proud of.

This said, I know the culture in Asia so I don't blame the individual. (Personally when I first got here to the States, a lot of things were a culture shock.) Things are very different in Asia for both better and worse. Blatant copying is just one of the worse aspects which is a symptom of a bigger problem. What do you expect in terms of creativity from a country of drones who work to produce more homogenous drones? What do you expect from drones who don't value anything other than money (and family)? There's no pride in being great and making something great, which is different than just being rich. Unless things change culturally, this is why China has a very low chance of making anything awesome, unless they copy Singapore where they import the West's talent and creativity, then the odds improve a little.

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