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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 energy to spend, yet boasting their awesomeness everywhere in order to sell.
Don't want your business copied? Make it available to everyone yourself in the first place.
Overrated is probably overstating it. It would be better to say: Originality Without Execution is Futile
I mean, Gutenberg invented the printing press after seeing a wine press crush grapes. Velcro was invented when some guy found burrs stuck to his trousers.
Genius isn’t conceiving some magic new technology. It's taking a mature technology and transplanting it elsewhere.
For Christmas, I bought myself a pass to Masterclass.com. They have classes by people like Malcolm Gladwell, Helen Mirren and Martin Scorsese.
I found that watching them sparks all kinds of unexpected epiphanies that you can apply to your life or your work.
For example, Deadmau5 has a folder of unfinished loops and melodies. He calls it his "Mr Potatohead" bin. He spends his time building little components – and then once in a while experiments with different ways of putting them together to make a track.
That's actually very similar to how I write.
Observing other professions is a great way to get your brain purring.
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.
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.
Just look at them, you can already see they live on the results that others produce. It's just about cloning other company's business idea. It's also a philosophy such kind of people apply to their whole life.
E.g. to their employees they probably set nearly unachievable goals. Then they start a vacation, while the employees are left to resolve the mess.
Customers and business partners? Often hear promises, but day by day requests for updates are responded with suggestions that leave the partners in more complicated questioning situations, maybe even stuff they should do to clear things up, so that they don't realize that again they didn't receive any results.
I don't even know much about these guys but from life experience and that photo this is my guess. Let others confirm or deny how correct it is. The article seems to confirm it. (only read after typing my guess)
> "I very rarely do interviews -- almost never,"
public, written proof of promises nobody intends to hold are annoying, right?
> Oliver takes issue with the prevailing notion that he and his brothers are driven purely by money. "If I was motivated by money alone, I would have stopped a long time ago," he insists. Rather, he suggests that what galvanises them is winning: "To prove over and over again that we're the best," he explains.
Let me put another quote against that: "It is not sufficient that I succeed – all others must fail." I strongly believe this is really their drive. They would do the same even if it would make a lot less money.
> Christian [i.e. person in very important position] was one of 50 people to drive Rocket, so losing him has no impact
As a German I have to say they are a disgrace and I'm sorry for their existence. I can tell you this: This kind of thinking is Southern German thinking, Bavarian. However neither Bavarians nor Germans really consider them Germans. Germans really are straight-forward, hard-working people, not bullshitters. Sadly since roughly 1936 Germany is lead by Bavarian/Austrian people, because they have more money and where lucky+sneaky enough to end up on the winning side with each political change.
They seem to have government support though, since Mutti Merkel really wants to turn Berlin into a Silicon Valley.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customers 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.
But 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 comp…
If nobody is taking risks in bold original ideas,
there is no longer any meaningful progress, rent-seeking becomes rampant
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customers 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.
But 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 comp…
The same problem is with the word 'talent.' To quote lines from one of my favorite research papers:
> What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a head held high rather than low in the water. Through the notion of talent, we transform particular actions that a human being does into an object possessed, held in trust for the day when it will be revealed for all to see.
I think better way to think about all this is in terms of problems and their solutions. If you know a your customers face certain problem and it has already been solved, go ahead and copy it. Customers don't care where the idea came from when you do what they want/need.
"The market only pays for what the market wants to buy." This is a typical wrong free market argument. You can create demand, it is a known mechanism in capitalism. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2016/10/22/create-a-...
Using that logic we can argue that warp drive will be just 20% innovation because things already travelled to other planets prior, we just made it faster.
Also market is talked about as something constant, but it always changes based on zillion of events.
Some person wants to build huge ass wall. Well demand for anything to do with wall building goes up.
Recreational drugs getting legalized. Anything to do with that will go up.
It is always easy to look at something which succeeded and find reasons why. It is way harder to actually succeed irrelevant of innovation percentage.
If one succeeds it will be just enough. If one fails, it will be too little or too much.