4 ms·
Making an exact (more or less) clone of a successful product isn't especially unethical to my way of thinking, but it is stupid. The original product has a "hea
by Zak 16y ago
Making an exact (more or less) clone of a successful product isn't especially unethical to my way of thinking, but it is stupid. The original product has a "head start" in the marketplace and you're almost certainly going to be playing catch-up in terms of market share and (here's the less part of "more or less") features.
What does make sense is a near-clone with a killer feature added. Google was like Altavista, but with results that are actually useful. reddit was just like delicious/popular, but with voting. Myspace was just like Friendster, but with uptime. Cheap/free when the competition is expensive usually counts as a killer feature, but isn't always the most effective way to make a profit.
- dman 16y agoI mostly agree with you but one small caveat - most companies do a relatively poor job of extracting economic value from their products on a global basis. So in this case if the OP is willing to work the Chinese local market much harder than Balsamiq can then the whole endeavour might actually be worthwhile. In short you dont have to beat the global maxima of product providers, just the local maxima.
- Zak 16y agoLocalization is very much a killer feature. Being just like Google[0] but with a China-centric instead of US-centric worldview seems to be working great for Baidu. [0] In terms of core-product, in the ways that matter to most users