Copycats

http://mattgemmell.com/2011/11/27/copycats/

by aaronbrethorst • 15 years ago

58 30 15 years ago

buster4• 15 years ago

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.

DRAGONERO3• 15 years ago

Have you ever seen and used phones prior 2007?

buster4• 15 years ago

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.

fuzionmonkey• 15 years ago

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

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

nirvana• 15 years ago

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.

rwolf• 15 years ago

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.

scottshea• 15 years ago

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.

danielharan• 15 years ago

"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...

dualboot• 15 years ago

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.

bad_user• 15 years ago

     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.

bluekeybox• 15 years ago

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.

Yaggo• 15 years ago

> 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...

mustpax• 15 years ago

"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.

FreakLegion• 15 years ago

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.

dspillett• 15 years ago

Copycats

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