
The case for copying business ideas - gx
https://clearfounder.com/originality-is-overrated-the-case-for-copying-business-ideas/
======
Hasknewbie
It should be noted that the concept of originality and its associated "mighty
pioneer Vs lowly copiers" mindset is mainly a Western cultural artifact. For
example in China during most of its history if you wanted to become, say, a
renowned painter, you were expected to spend your formative years copying the
masters, because in that culture mastering your craft is (much) more important
than being original.

I don't hold originality in that much high regard for two reasons: first, it
tends to downplay the part that's not original, and most of the time that's
most of the product. Everything Is A Remix [1]. And second, I would have more
respect for distinct products if they didn't result in endless
copyright/patent extensions -- it becomes a bit too easy to say it was "your
idea" if it applies to stuff created 60 years ago. At some point it should
become part of the baseline, instead of undue revenue for rent-seekers.

[1] [https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-
series/](https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/)

~~~
corporateslaver
How many ground breaking innovations has China had? How many has the west had?
Case in point, copying is not productive in the long run.

~~~
sho
People said that about Japan 40 years, they said that about Korea 20 years
ago, and it's already becoming irrelevant about China today. Yes, they caught
up by copying, like everyone else did (including the USA).

There are now entire product categories which come out of China and no-where
else. Drones. Camera gymbals. Personal electric scooters. Heck, their entire
system of government could be called "innovative" \- certainly no-one else has
ever tried _that_ before.

Give it 20 years and it'll be onto the next developing country which is
copying to catch up, and China will be amongst the lead innovators - if not,
as I suspect, the easy winner.

~~~
Sangermaine
>Heck, their entire system of government could be called "innovative" \-
certainly no-one else has ever tried that before.

Authoritarian one-party rule with a strongman at the top is nothing new, they
just have newer tools to enforce it.

~~~
sho
Every shelf at your local store filled with imports from that one-party state
is pretty new in my book. And "strongman"? What are you basing that on? Saddam
Hussein was a "strongman". Xi Jinping is unusually powerful for the president
of the CCP, sure, but he still needs to be re-elected in 2022.

------
0898
Smart people have always stolen ideas from completely unrelated industries.

I mean, Gutenberg invented the printing press after seeing a wine press crush
grapes. Velcro was invented when some guy found burrs stuck to his trousers.

Genius isn’t conceiving some magic new technology. It's taking a mature
technology and transplanting it elsewhere.

For Christmas, I bought myself a pass to Masterclass.com. They have classes by
people like Malcolm Gladwell, Helen Mirren and Martin Scorsese.

I found that watching them sparks all kinds of unexpected epiphanies that you
can apply to your life or your work.

For example, Deadmau5 has a folder of unfinished loops and melodies. He calls
it his "Mr Potatohead" bin. He spends his time building little components –
and then once in a while experiments with different ways of putting them
together to make a track.

That's actually very similar to how I write.

Observing other professions is a great way to get your brain purring.

~~~
oftenwrong
>For example, Deadmau5 has a folder of unfinished loops and melodies. He calls
it his "Mr Potatohead" bin. He spends his time building little components –
and then once in a while experiments with different ways of putting them
together to make a track.

KRS-One reportedly did something similar:

> ‘Go to the car, and get me the black, blue, and green bags. And bring those
> here.’ They bring them in. ‘Great.’ He unzips these duffle bags full of
> stacks and stacks of rhyme notebooks. Rhymes he wrote in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
> He’ll go, ‘Umm, let’s see here, and that, and here, give me that yellow one,
> okay, and give me that brown one. Okay, let’s go lay the song.’ And he uses
> like three different rhymes, but they all sound relevant. And they sound
> like something he just wrote. He just skims through it, and murmurs then
> goes, ‘Okay, I got it.’ These are rhymes he been had, and they sound like
> today. That’s amazing.

from [https://www.complex.com/music/2011/02/dj-premier-tells-
all-s...](https://www.complex.com/music/2011/02/dj-premier-tells-all-stories-
behind-classic-records/mc-act-like-they-dont-know)

I'm pretty sure he was referencing this practice in _1, 2 Pass it_ :

>I'm the difference between indo and oregano. Imagine how fresh I am now; I
made these lyrics up a year ago.

------
jacquesm
The Samwer brothers have turned this into a huge business.

[http://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-clone-
factory](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-clone-factory)

(Fun tidbit: that photograph is _also_ a clone, of a sleeve for a Kraftwerk
record: [https://nerdist.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/maxresdefault...](https://nerdist.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/maxresdefault-3.jpg))

~~~
SiempreViernes
I think that qualifies as a _homage_ rather than a simple "clone".

------
shubhamjain
There are probably very few original ideas anyway. Google wasn't new, search
engines already existed. Yahoo! wasn't new, web directories already existed.
If you trace it hard enough, you could get to filling cabinets and folders.
Over the years, I have realized that the idea of 'idea' is itself problematic.
It implies that you can describe something very complex with a simple phrase
(in hindsight, of course). What was iPhone? A smartphone done right? To get to
iPhone, Apple had to solve thousands of tiny problems and it's rather
simplistic to say that other companies missed the wave because of complacence.
You don't decide to make a better smartphone, and declare your victory.

The same problem is with the word 'talent.' To quote lines from one of my
favorite research papers:

> What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular
> things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a
> head held high rather than low in the water. Through the notion of talent,
> we transform particular actions that a human being does into an object
> possessed, held in trust for the day when it will be revealed for all to
> see.

I think better way to think about all this is in terms of problems and their
solutions. If you know a your customers face certain problem and it has
already been solved, go ahead and copy it. Customers don't care where the idea
came from when you do what they want/need.

~~~
izacus
This whole concept of idea ownership is pretty damaging to progress - most
progress in 20th century was seeing several companies compete in same space
and take ideas from competitors, iterating on them and integrating them in
new, improved products.

Imagine if one car company could "own" the idea of blind spot monitoring. Or
navigation. Or rear view camera.

~~~
nicbou
On the other hand, there is little incentive to spend a billion dollars
developing a one dollar product if it gets copied by everyone else. It can
incentivize stagnation.

~~~
simplify
I imagine that scenario applies to very few industries and should not dictate
the norms of others.

------
bitL
This sums all that is wrong with business. A few original pioneers at the
beginning and the rest are at best slightly improved copies as they require
lowest energy to spend, yet boasting their awesomeness everywhere in order to
sell.

~~~
onion2k
Customers want iteration, evolution, and low-risk change. If every new product
was a wholesale paradigm shift very few people would ever change what they
spend their money on.

~~~
bitL
But that creates companies like Behringer; they are right now in the process
of cloning every single famous synthesizer that has expired IP, selling it for
5-10x less than the original manufacturers. This would obviously lead to
market full of cheap clones (of course welcome by customers), but the original
designers would end up on the streets or are forced to change their mindsets
to cloners, likely in 20 years completely destroying the market. If nobody is
taking risks in bold original ideas, there is no longer any meaningful
progress, rent-seeking becomes rampant (we see it with the massive push to
subscriptions everywhere already) and once creative exciting industry becomes
stale and unappealing.

~~~
hau
Sitting on an idea indefinitely is not a good prospect either. Original
developers knew that IP would expire and still produced original design.
There're always risks, originality has some protection but so is availability
and freedom of innovating at manufacturing, freedom to compete at costs.
Original things can't be plenty if you can't base your work on something that
someone made before. These synthesisers are based on complex previous
developments, and those were an IP once. And surely those devs wouldn't end up
on the street, that's ridiculous.

~~~
bitL
Look at what is happening with Gibson (sellers of CakeWalk, Oberheim etc.),
how many bankruptcies/forced mergers happened in that space recently; now
imagine getting a perfect clone maker to the mix, selling "legends" for cheap
that might be good enough for 90% of users; the original idea people won't
have any funding coming from their older works, some of them might risk it for
some new idea that if not received well bankrupts them personally and they
indeed end up on the street. It's happening all the time, we just don't like
to hear about it.

~~~
hau
Didn't Gibson profited enough from their _acquired_ IP? Surely they have to
compete at some point and not just own idea forever doing nothing but moving
shareholders property. Most importantly, engineers and idea-makers behind
original solution made more than enough profit since CakeWalk and Oberheim
were produced. Poor Gibson can't buy right IP at the right time so they can do
nothing and not make anything new - who cares.

>some of them might risk it for some new idea that if not received well
bankrupts them personally

Owning IP exclusively forever doesn't change this at all. If IP is good then
you can defend it for a some time to make profit on edge.

>It's happening all the time

Not with synthesizers/software/ee developers because of IP expiring too soon.

>now imagine getting a perfect clone maker to the mix, selling "legends" for
cheap that might be good enough for 90% of users;

Imagine what all these people could do now! They could produce new innovative
things.

Imagine Gibson was shit and would make shit new software that would cost as
much as possible and own IP forever. That's easy to imagine because IP rights
holders pushing hard for this change. That's sucks for everyone but Gibson
since they get $ doing nothing. They cn also easily fire anyone involved in
this innovation and prevent them from working with anything similar.

------
AndrewKemendo
_2\. It 's likely not up to you anyway_

This is the conclusion I'm coming to with pretty much all things that are
popular. It's also why "timing" is the most important thing in determining
success of - well - anything. I think the only way it really works to be
successful, as in wildly successful with a paradigm shifting concept or idea,
is to work with small wins on the same thing for decades and hope that the
zeitgeist shifts enough to be open to adopting your vision which you can then
accelerate.

One trap here though is getting cynical and jealous when a new market entrant
gets all the popularity, while the long tooth person gets very little. Ted
Nelson is a perfect example of this and it's a little sad to see - though I
understand where it's coming from.

------
chiefalchemist
Overrated is probably overstating it. It would be better to say:

Originality Without Execution is Futile

~~~
blackoil
Problem with Originality is that you have no one else's mistakes to learn
from. Also the ecosystem and market around does not exist, so the execution is
not only riskier but costly also.

------
dredmorbius
Originality is largely a concept born after 1750.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28an+original...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28an+original+idea+*+100%29%2Coriginality&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%28an%20original%20idea%20%2A%20100%29%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Coriginality%3B%2Cc0)

An 1850 discussion:
[https://archive.org/stream/mechanicsmagazi48unkngoog#page/n2...](https://archive.org/stream/mechanicsmagazi48unkngoog#page/n265/mode/1up)

------
timavr
Reading this article, the bar for something to be truly innovative is super
high.

Using that logic we can argue that warp drive will be just 20% innovation
because things already travelled to other planets prior, we just made it
faster.

Also market is talked about as something constant, but it always changes based
on zillion of events.

Some person wants to build huge ass wall. Well demand for anything to do with
wall building goes up.

Recreational drugs getting legalized. Anything to do with that will go up.

It is always easy to look at something which succeeded and find reasons why.
It is way harder to actually succeed irrelevant of innovation percentage.

If one succeeds it will be just enough. If one fails, it will be too little or
too much.

------
mrhappyunhappy
It seems the recipe is to take a broad service, niche it down and improve
specifically for that niche and you've got yourself something new but based on
a previous success - taking out any guesswork whether it's going to succeed.

------
m0skit0
"The market only pays for what the market wants to buy."

This is a typical wrong free market argument. You can create demand, it is a
known mechanism in capitalism.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2016/10/22/create-a-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2016/10/22/create-
a-demand-for-a-new-product/#1f27019d7e2d)

~~~
keketi
Being able to create demand and market only paying for what the market wants
to buy are not mutually exclusive. One can create demand for a product through
marketing and people are still buying what they want.

------
erikb
> So why are they so vilified?

Just look at them, you can already see they live on the results that others
produce. It's just about cloning other company's business idea. It's also a
philosophy such kind of people apply to their whole life.

E.g. to their employees they probably set nearly unachievable goals. Then they
start a vacation, while the employees are left to resolve the mess.

Customers and business partners? Often hear promises, but day by day requests
for updates are responded with suggestions that leave the partners in more
complicated questioning situations, maybe even stuff they should do to clear
things up, so that they don't realize that again they didn't receive any
results.

I don't even know much about these guys but from life experience and that
photo this is my guess. Let others confirm or deny how correct it is. The
article seems to confirm it. (only read after typing my guess)

> "I very rarely do interviews -- almost never,"

public, written proof of promises nobody intends to hold are annoying, right?

> Oliver takes issue with the prevailing notion that he and his brothers are
> driven purely by money. "If I was motivated by money alone, I would have
> stopped a long time ago," he insists. Rather, he suggests that what
> galvanises them is winning: "To prove over and over again that we're the
> best," he explains.

Let me put another quote against that: "It is not sufficient that I succeed –
all others must fail." I strongly believe this is really their drive. They
would do the same even if it would make a lot less money.

> Christian [i.e. person in very important position] was one of 50 people to
> drive Rocket, so losing him has no impact

As a German I have to say they are a disgrace and I'm sorry for their
existence. I can tell you this: This kind of thinking is Southern German
thinking, Bavarian. However neither Bavarians nor Germans really consider them
Germans. Germans really are straight-forward, hard-working people, not
bullshitters. Sadly since roughly 1936 Germany is lead by Bavarian/Austrian
people, because they have more money and where lucky+sneaky enough to end up
on the winning side with each political change.

They seem to have government support though, since Mutti Merkel really wants
to turn Berlin into a Silicon Valley.

~~~
erikb
Jut FYI: Lot's of downvotes but not a single person until now could argue what
their problem is. Are you downvoters one of the parasites? Or do you like to
get exploited?

