[HN Gopher] When to Copy Ideas, When to Steal Ideas ___________________________________________________________________ When to Copy Ideas, When to Steal Ideas Author : davnicwil Score : 42 points Date : 2020-03-18 09:38 UTC (13 hours ago) (HTM) web link (davnicwil.com) (TXT) w3m dump (davnicwil.com) | gumby wrote: | There's even more to this. davnicwil says just use the same | sponge cake and excel in your area of expertise: the icing. Good | advice. | | Alternatively, if you are a "fast follower": after the other | company has evangelized the new feature (sponge cake) and started | to build an audience for it, you can see what features seem to | really matter and either make a simplified one or one that | addresses the limitations of it. | | A great example is the iPod, the famously lame latecomer ("no | wifi, less space than a nomad. Lame"). Apple launched into a | market which was already developing (tiny MP3 players), and not | only put their own "icing" on it (e.g. design) but addressed a | couple of the fundamental problems with the existing ones (the | complexity of getting music into them and navigating to find what | you want). So they weren't even really competing with the other | players. | phsource wrote: | > Copy [means] to borrow an idea for its known useful results; | steal [means] to take ownership of an idea and extend it to | create some novel result. | | > Copy the same sponge any cake could use, then using your own | creative talents as icing to make something uniquely great | (steal) in the areas that make a difference in your product's | niche... Steal strategy! Copy tactics | | As an engineer working on product, this is good advice. It's | often appealing to reinvent the wheel and succumb to "not-built- | here" symptom. Especially when it comes to questions like "what | stack and language to use", often, the best answer is "whatever | has worked before." Rather, what's worth reinventing is the | actual features or user-facing aspects of the product. | | Don't go crazy making your own global Javascript store: just roll | Redux or MobX. As someone who loves engineering challenges, I | find myself reining myself in a lot on this at Wanderlog | (https://wanderlog.com). But I realize whether we're successful | or not isn't going to be our technical infrastructure. That needs | be solid, but what really matters are the little things we can do | to wow travelers ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-03-18 23:00 UTC)