"We launched first, so they must have copied us." - I really wish I'd quit hearing this.
Just because you wrote code fast and launched fast doesn't mean someone else did. It could be they took their sweet time and had actually started first, but you beat them to market.
It IS possible for 2 people to envision the same concept in the same way. It's actually quite likely, given how imagination works.
Having said that, I also don't think there's anything wrong with seeing something and thinking you can do it slightly better. That's the nature of capitalism.
Yeah I had a reaction like this in the past, but I got to meet the people who worked on a similar project as mine and they did their thing completely independently. I can't say the same of another group who took my css files for their site. Can't be anymore obvious than that. I'm pretty sure they died off anyway.
That's why the patent system doesn't really account for real world business, either. In the real world when you have a "product category" you will have competitors that copy each other's features and try to do them better.
This happens everywhere, in every single product category. Yet, if the patent system was actually enforced for every infringed patent, you wouldn't be able to do that at all, which would dramatically slow down competition in each product category.
Having a "product category" by default means that 80% of the product is similar between competitors, otherwise if it were 100% original you'd have completely different products not in the same product category.
And the patent system doesn't account for that all, and acts as if it's ok to not let anyone do something remotely similar (see Apple vs Samsung case in Europe) for 17 years.
Agreed with wccrawford. There are just so many things that become self-evident if you watch the trends. Seeing that the digital elite tends to hang out on the same sites and forums, it's hardly surprising that we'd find a spark of the idea from the same trends and lead to similar output.
Just because you wrote code fast and launched fast doesn't mean someone else did. It could be they took their sweet time and had actually started first, but you beat them to market.
It IS possible for 2 people to envision the same concept in the same way. It's actually quite likely, given how imagination works.
Having said that, I also don't think there's anything wrong with seeing something and thinking you can do it slightly better. That's the nature of capitalism.