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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 ene
by bitL 8y ago
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 8y agoCustomers 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.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoNah. Customers want low friction and solutions. Fact: NO ONE wakes up and thinks "I gotta buy me some iteration today." Iteration, evolution and low-risk change are means. They are not ends.
- lovemenot 8y agoThis reads like so much marketing blurb. Opinion dressed as fact. I would argue, but would not presume to state as fact, that the large majority of Japanese actually prefer iteration over radical innovation, almost all of the time.
- nicbou 8y agoThis also reads like opinion dressed as fact
- pixl97 8y agoWould you argue that most businesses want to massively retrain their employee base every few months? My work experience tells me that companies commonly put off major updates because of retraining costs and scheduling.
- lovemenot 8y agoI didn't have supporting evidence for my opinion, so I explicitly did not claim it as a fact. Please point out why you felt I claimed an opinion as a fact, perhaps I could improve my communication with your help.
- bitL 8y agoBut 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.
- ttoinou 8y agoIf nobody is taking risks in bold original ideas, there is no longer any meaningful progress, rent-seeking becomes rampant Seems backward, it's IP protection by law that is rent-seeking
- hau 8y agoSitting 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 8y agoLook 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.
- okket 8y agoBeing a pioneer does not mean success. It is the execution that counts. The core business idea is important, but less than half of the whole picture.
- lmm 8y agoAs a European and an android user, without the "copiers" most of those "original pioneers" would deliver no value to me, so I'm very glad the "copiers" exist. Don't want your business copied? Make it available to everyone yourself in the first place.
- nicbou 8y agoWhat if the discovery process is risky and expensive? Protecting the idea is what pays the investors back.
- lmm 8y agoI'd rather there be a few investors making products that I get to use than a lot of investors making products that I don't get to use.
- kolpa 8y agoI think the idea is that if you license your work for slightly less than the cost of copying, everybody wins. But if you refuse to license, it's a net loss. This model goes far but does break down as the ratio of cost of creation to cost of duplication increases.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoIn India, Flipkart is often criticized for "copying" Amazon's idea (not that "sell stuff online" was revolutionary to begin with). But the thing is, Flipkart entered the Indian market before Amazon. As a consumer, I derived more value from Flipkart's "copy" that served me than from Amazon's "originality". Same with Android. As a consumer, Android may have copied iOS, but Android's copy was far more affordable to me, and hence, I derived far more value from it than the original.
- 32qwef 8y agoThis sums up everything right with business. Market forces drive technology to constantly improve as new products build on the ideas of the past. - Business is not art. - Even art isn't totally original.
- gbacon 8y agoPioneers get killed; settlers prosper.
- maxk42 8y agoPioneers die of dysentery.