Steve Jobs' friend Bill Gates cloned the Macintosh with Windows and his other friend Eric Schmidt cloned the iPhone with Android. I'm sure that felt bad but his primary feeling should have been pity. He created a company so much better than his competitors that their biggest successes are poor clones of his next-generation products. He showed Gates the future of PCs and he showed Schmidt the future of smartphones. Bu…
I thought Jobs borrowed the GUI from Xerox.
There's a significant difference between creating a next-generation version of something and attempting to blindly clone someone else's work.
The iPhone was inspired by work that Palm did but it wasn't an attempt at cloning it. Zune was an attempt at cloning the iPod. Google+ was an attempt at cloning Facebook. Facebook was inspired by Friendster/MySpace, but not a clone.