Aaah, I knew I'd seen this article before!

http://swombat.com/2011/4/14/copying-stealing

(haven't changed my comments about this.. see above!)

tl;dr : people will copy your idea, so focus on really listening to you customer's needs.

Seriously, did we really need over 1000 words of "rah rah startups" to get to that point? This feels like it could be a good article - for example, I enjoyed the use of the browser wars as a case study, but disappointed that it ended with a weak tie to an unoriginal conclusion ("listen to customers").

This happened to me twice in the last year. The first time the it was mostly just copying the idea and that gave me a real kick in butt to work faster. Second time they went as far as taking my stylesheet (they couldn't copy my apps code since it's minified and obfuscated and I don't think they had enough skills to figure out how to undo that).

Both time I started by being annoyed and mad. Then I realize that someone stole from me so I must have done something they thought was good. Then I realized what I made is actually shit and the people who copied are not very bright about taking it :) and moved to fixing the bugs and bad design decisions I had taken.

The second copier pissed me off a little more because their stuff did things my app couldn't yet wrapping it in my shitty style was a dumb shortcut. They are trying to build a company on it, they should seriously put efforts into the look cause what I had done was thrown together in an hour. I just wish people innovated a little more that way I'd have something to take back.

All this is a great motivation booster to move faster. I think the author is right, it's necessary to have copy cats to prove the idea good.

I think the moral of the story is not to get attached to ideas. Ideas in themselves are worth nothing, what matters is the execution. Also, once you're reached success, don't rest on your laurels or someone will out-execute you.

> knowing and caring about your customers more than anyone else.

Serve your customers, love your customers? Does it work...? Business books seem to be about "competitor advantage": network effects, switching costs, lowest-cost provider, mind-share, patents.

But it's true that if you are the current leader, you will know your customers better, because you're interacted with them more (and their responses are also specific to your product).

BTW: I believe that MS deliberately didn't update IE, because they didn't want the web to happen (it would undermine their platform and apps).

so this is an example of content being sucked into and hosted on bo.lt ? Does it mean I should be looking for changes that someone @ bo.lt would have made to the original article?

Good startups copy, great startups steal: customers.