> Think of all the iconic products and designs that endure, and remain incredibly successful, while dozens of also-ran knock-offs appear, wither and die on a mo

> Think of all the iconic products and designs that endure, and remain incredibly successful, while dozens of also-ran knock-offs appear, wither and die on a monthly basis. Bluuuh. "Think of all the X" just invites the availability heuristic. You immediately think of the products that became huge successes and introduced something new into the mainstream. Successful but boring products don't come to mind because they're boring, and the failed but novel products don't come to mind because you never heard of them. Averaged over the whole industry, I would guess that new products need a fairly small amount of originality, and adding more is correlated with failure. If you want to be the best in your area, by all means go the extra mile to understand the problem deeply. But if you want to be good enough in 20 different areas, your best bet is to be a copycat in all of them, because originality is expensive and risky and your resources are not infinite.