

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. - sabat

Quote of the Day from Google:<p>Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.<p>Discuss.
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david927
It's true, that if it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

But do worry. Because the people who make money off of any invention are
rarely the inventors. It's the people who brought it successfully to market.
Did Bill Gates invent anything, for example? It's hard to make acceptance
curve, but once you do, you want to be in the driver's seat.

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Hexstream
Some people worry that if their product is very successful, it will be copied
by the competition...

Why worry about a competitor that can only (try to) keep up with you by
copying you? If you continue innovating at a rapid pace, by the time they
catch up to what you have now, the distance between you and them will have
only gotten bigger.

~~~
revolvingcur
Unless they happen to be that special blend of better and faster, in which
case they will out-innovate and overtake you. However, that probably would
have been inevitable anyway.

~~~
Hexstream
I think it's a small risk to take to be able to go all out.

Reminds me of playing Warcraft II online.

At first, my strategy was to be as small as possible on the map so that maybe
I can stay in the shadows long enough to maybe get strong enough to maybe
eventually beat my opponent. My play got much, much better when I realized
it's better to be strong even if it makes you more visible, because then
they're screwed anyway.

Hope you'll forgive the lighthearted analogy.

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gojomo
Hey! You stole that quote without attribution from Howard Aiken!

~~~
sabat
Woops -- that was an honest accident. Didn't mean to rob the Aiken of credit
due!

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mixmax
It's true - what is there to discuss?

~~~
akkartik
_"Chuang-Tzu had it right. No more need be said. But such is human nature that
the more succinctly we state the truth, the better we become at ignoring it.
So, despite the completeness of the above homily, I'll proceed, hoping that my
volume may insinuate into your worldview what Chuang-Tzu's brevity might
not."_

I think I like this quote -- especially the part about volume insinuating into
worldview -- almost more than the quote it's referring to
([http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/T...](http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/The_Pursuit_of_Emptyness.html))

Heh, and it's directly in contradiction with what I said here recently
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117233>).

