Don't Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging

The 99c vampire romance novels on the Kindle Store don't undermine Stephanie Meyer, they reinforce her status as a thought leader. The waves of Apple-derived industrial design (here's looking at you, HP Envy!) entrench the status of Jony Ive as the only designer that matters. Counterfeit designer clothes and accessories are the reason that luxury department stores in London are now employing Mandarin-speaking staff.

If you're not delighted that people are ripping off your ideas, you've badly misunderstood the modern market. On the internet, the worst thing you can be is ignored. Imitation means that not only is your idea good enough to notice, but that it's good enough to slavishly copy. The clones might get a few hits or a few bucks, but the social capital is all yours.

If a company is always progressing and improving upon it's product or service, then this leaves less room for people to come in and steal their idea and "improve" upon it. Even if there are copycats that come into the market and try to improve upon the core concept, the fact that you're working to build upon your business inspires loyalty and reach among your base of users. I think it's these types of companies that are the hardest to compete with, making stealing their idea even tougher to execute.

What wiener did is commendable in its own right without taking any credit away from curtis.

But before this turns into a huge thing, please, come back to the ground. This blog idea or the style is pretty trivial. Its not as if this is linux or a programming language or anything like that.

Were I to be in curtis's position, I might feel like I should have been in control of all aspects of unveiling it to the public and noone must take any credit for anything. But then I would be childish now, wouldn't I?

Have we heard from curtis yet? Maybe his opinion is completely different than that of the article's author.