Microsoft, Apple, and Creative Business
Wil Shipley, Mac developer, on imitation by competitors:
I like it when competitors copy me because it means they aren’t about to leapfrog me: they’ll always be playing catch-up.
Copying your competitors is magnificently stupid. It’s a great way to ruin your business and a sure fire way to give yourself a headache. Also, it makes you look tremendously uncool (think of Microsoft and the Zune, which was oh, I don’t know, “inspired” by the iPod).
The main problem I have with copying isn’t that it infringes some kind of creative individuality, it’s just that it’s such a bad idea. When you copy a more successful business, you aren’t copying the reasons for their success; you’re copying the results of those reasons. Big difference.
Apple, for example, have a well-earned reputation as a creative, forward-thinking, innovative business. Microsoft do not. When Microsoft went to get in on the MP3 player market, they just make an iPod clone — small box, plays songs, has a music store. How’s that working out then? The problem of course is that you can’t build and market a massively innovative music device unless you’re actually massively innovative. Copying the result just doesn’t cut the mustard.
When you see someone doing something you admire, don’t try to imitate what they do; find out why they’re doing it and learn from that instead. Any business that wants to be like Apple should forget about being like Apple and just go innovate. Forget the accepted ways of doing things and dare to be different.
What will end up happening if you just copy other people’s success is that you’ll become a husk of a business, without any fresh ideas and with no internal drive, other than to latch on to the tail ends of other people’s success. You’ll also spend your working life feeling ever so slightly lost, because just copying behaviour never feels quite right: there’s an element of pretension about it that you can never escape.
So, in the spirit of this post I’d encourage you to ignore what I’ve said and go think for yourself about how to make something cool!