Google clones 37sig: "Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong."

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/april#tue-08-huddlechat

by nickb • 18 years ago

16 21 18 years ago

aristus• 18 years ago

Hmm. It's brutal but not "wrong", by which I think the poster means "unfair & anti-competitive".

The point of this platform is to make it easier to write applications. They proved it by cloning the poster child for the last prod-hype-tivity platform, RoR. Life goes on.

gaika3• 18 years ago

Wrong in the sense that is not how you make your platform attractive to developers. What happened to "do not be evil"?

nilobject• 18 years ago

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

akkartik• 18 years ago

Really?! If one of the example apps for your platform is a clone of an existing -- and profitable -- service, your platform's suddenly super-attractive to this developer.

axod2• 18 years ago

I'd say if your entire app can be cloned in a day, it's fair game. Hardly rocket science.

andrewparker• 18 years ago

Yes, there's no defensibility in functionality.

antiismist• 18 years ago

What about issues of design? Even if the individual features are easy, it is hard to get the right mix and in the right spots.

As an analogy, is it OK to copy a font and call it your own?

axod2• 18 years ago

Given the brief of "Make a webchat client", it's hard to come up with a different design that would work.

Like an email client, it has an obvious design that works.

pg• 18 years ago

It doesn't look as if Google did it in order to take 37signals' customers, just to show off AE. At worst, the guys who built it were making a snarky point about how easy it would be to knock off Campfire.

However, if that was their point, they didn't make it. There are a lot of things that are easy to copy, but hard to design. Copying a page of Shakespeare doesn't prove much about his skills or yours. The work was the thought that went into it, not the physical writing.

So much for the theoretical point; as a practical matter, slavish copying doesn't pay either. All you get is a snapshot of the thing you copied, without the thought behind it.

sanswork• 18 years ago

Having looked at campfire it looks like just about every other webchat system I have ever used going back to 2000. What is it exactly about the design that sets them apart? All the elements are the exact same from what I can see.

icky• 18 years ago

It comes with free 37signals Kool-Aid, and man, is that good Kool-Aid...

annoyed• 18 years ago

does anyone remember or is still using irc?

asenchi• 18 years ago

Yes, I use it daily both at work and at home (still my favorite type of chat).

pius• 18 years ago

I use it just about every day. I've found it pretty crucial for working with the bleeding edge trunk of certain open source libraries.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

The Drupal community lives on irc. The Rails community also makes extensive use of it -- or at least they did last year when I still had time to pay close attention to Rails.

irc is alive and well.

jamesbritt• 18 years ago

Yes. Use it all day at work.

Super handy.

nuggien• 18 years ago

37 signals: "let's make some simple apps that can be copied in a couple of days, dumb down the design, then get our fanboys to cry foul when people 'copy' us".

nirmal• 18 years ago

I don't get the complaining. It's a sample to show the power of AE. It's not as if Google has released HuddleChat on the level of Gmail or Google Maps. Speaking of which, does anyone know if Yahoo or MS complained about design copying when Gmail was released?

From the comments of the RWW post about this http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/huddlechat_campfire_rip...

""" As one of the App Engine product managers, I wanted to give an update -- we've now taken HuddleChat down from the App Engine app gallery. The App Engine team was looking for some sample apps to help kick the tires on their new system, so we invited Googlers to build some as side projects. A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent web chat would do the trick. We've heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.

Thanks, Pete Koomen Product Manager, Google App Engine Team """

Google clones 37sig: "Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong."

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