Tumblr's not alone -- Innovation Works also has a pretty decent copy of my last start-up, Flurry, called Umeng. (For the curious, compare the product at flurry.com and umeng.com.) I've been watching Umeng for a bit and the services have slightly diverged, presumably because Umeng's learnt a bit more about the Chinese market and adapted its product. But the initial product was just a straight-up clone.
I am a little surprised to see this from as respected a person as Kai-Fu Lee, who I'd expect to be innovating, but you just have to shrug. This sort of thing happens in business, and it's not worth getting too excited about.
"Innovation to help achieve the goals of sustainable development can start in many ways, including: “copy-catting” (i.e. Japan, Korea and China first mimicking manufacturing techniques and then becoming world leaders.); “piggy-backing” (i.e. India performing service work for rich countries and adapting information technology to local needs); and “leap-frogging” (skipping over technologies that are inappropriate in a given place and time and adopting more sustainable solutions).
....................
“Copycats” imitate ideas, technologies and techniques from other countries and improve and adapt them. During its first few decades, the United States took the key
secrets of the Industrial Revolution from England, Scotland and France and launched its own industrial economy. Two centuries later, Japan and then Korea developed by
adapting American manufacturing, raising the quality and lowering costs. These days, China is doing it with much success, moving up the innovation ladder at a rapid rate.
“Piggybackers” ride on the backs of rich nations by doing more and more of their manufacturing and service work at far lower costs. India is practicing the art of
piggybacking right now, using advanced computing and communications technologies to perform software development, tele-services, and even high-level innovation at a fraction of the labor costs compared to performing the same jobs in the United States or Western Europe. A recent study showed that one in ten U.S. software jobs will be exported to places like India and China over the next five years.
Finally, “leapfrogs” skip over inappropriate technologies and embrace new ones, such as Finland’s sudden break from Soviet domination and its rapid adoption and development of new inventions like wireless networks.
I like the list of strategies, but I have to question calling any one of them "The Chinese Way." I mean, here in the US, companies leapfrog, piggyback, and copy all the time -- often within the same product. So you might as well call it all "The American Way." With the size and diversity of the tech industries in Japan, China, and India, we can probably assume they're using The American Way too. Which I think is great (the occasional bit of outright plagiarism aside).
While this example is a little extreme in its similarity with the original, copying a startup idea and implementing it in another market than an English speaking is not just done in China. Here's an article about a bunch of european startups doing the same:
I've often wondered if one of the (many) reasons why there are so few successful startups coming out of Europe is due to the copying.
I visited Berlin a while back and my buddy was telling me about a bunch of guys who've built a successful business (dozens of engineers) just cloning 'hot' American products.
It's got to reduce the number of people working on brand new ideas. (I'm not suggesting that you can't build a great business by copying somebody else's work, but you won't build a world-changing, super innovative company doing so)
its clever because not every us startup works without localisation everywhere. ebay/groupon and to a certain degree facebook need localization and if they arent able to get this fast clones will appear and people will flock to these clones because the idea is great but the us company is incapable/unwilling to cater to different markets than the us fast enough. it seems as if other markets are only an afterthought.
From a VC fund perspective, this is a sound investment strategy -- take what works in the US and clone it in your market. It lowers risk significantly since the idea already has traction. At some point you'll have to innovate, but you can always copy until then.
Gosling Emacs (copying ITS and Multics Emacs), which eventually became GNU Emacs
Excel (copying Lotus 1-2-3, to the point that VisiCalc slash commands still work in Excel last time I tried them about five years ago)
OpenOffice (copying Microsoft Office)
C compilers everywhere (copying the original Unix C compiler)
Compaq's clone PC (copying the IBM PC, and giving rise to the entire IBM-compatible market)
Friendster (copying Sixdegrees)
Facebook (copying Friendster, somewhat less faithfully)
Every modern IDE (copying Turbo Pascal)
Every modern search engine (copying Google)
MS-DOS (copying CP/M and a little bit of Unix)
MercadoLibre (copying eBay)
Intel's current x64 CPU line (copying AMD)
Netscape (copying Mosaic)
Internet Explorer (copying Netscape)
Wordpress (copying Movable Type) (I'm not sure who to credit with the modern blog, with its comment threads, "after the jump", and permalinks. Pyra?)
Being able to copy the look and feel of competing products is crucially important to allowing innovation to continue. If Personal Software Inc. still had a monopoly on spreadsheets, it's a good bet that the spreadsheets we use today wouldn't have progressed much from where we were in 1984. The interface designs that seem innovative and unique today are either faddish crap or the baseline from which tomorrow's innovation begins.
There's a big difference between copying conventions and literally copying the colour scheme/gradients.
Many of your examples have the competitor creating a slightly different style, be it button style or menus. Open Office/Microsoft Office. Windows versus MacOS.
Hell, look at DuckDuckGo and Bing. Sure they are both search engines (just like Google) but they still have a slightly different visual identity and results page than Google.
HN is very similar to Reddit but still tries to do small things that differentiate it.
The original post looks like literal translation of Tumblr. Even if they changed the colors so that it fit with it's own identity I could agree with your point but this is not even close to being the case.
Though there is something wrong with directly copying UI elements with just a text change - that should be completely frowned upon and called out imho.
Other than that - competition is good, and imitation should be seen as you are doing something good, now just make sure you can keep up or do it better consistently unless you want your competition to take over the market share.
I'm not against stealing ideas and methods from other companies, internalising them then IMPROVE upon them. That's part of innovation.
But blatant copying?! Even the UI?! C'mon Kai-fu, I'm sure Innovation Work can do better than that. The whole purpose of Innovation Work (which is itself a copy of YC, for those of you who don't know) is to spur entrepreneurialism in the region, but all I see is setting up a very bad example. I can't imagine how the founders feel OWNERSHIP in their startups. It's more like a gold rush.
I'm disappointed with what Kai-Fu Lee is doing; I guess I expect more from him.
Disappointment aside, though, this strategy works. Take something that works, and apply to the China market. Why reinvent the wheel? But I'd argue that they should do a better job with "copying" -- you don't really want to invite criticism for no gain, unless the blatantness of copying is part of the strategy (to show investors that they literally and successfully cut-and-paste working startup businesses, like an assembly line).
Hmm, now that I think about it, perhaps that's the whole point.
Something that we tend to forget is that we learn by imitation — and industries are no different than individuals. Chinese firms will start to evolve their software to local tastes and will slowly set themselves apart from mere clones that don't translate well. That will be followed by free form borrowing of the best ideas from multiple sites — and that will be followed by local innovations. And at that point China will begin to export their software as the world wants to talk to them (much the way you'd join LinkedIn from abroad if you wanted to do business with Americans).
As much as it pains me as a person who values intellectual property, I have to admit that copying is a valid and important strategy. At least half (anyone know of a more educated number?) of the development in Asia since the Meji Restoration consists of pasting Western ideas.
I hope this means that all startups take the internationalization seriously from the beginning. Hopefully we can get some sort of solid services / startups / processes that can help internationalize companies much earlier on.
The current crop of localization services are frankly inadequate.
There's a difference between ideas and the expression of those ideas; that's why patent and copyright are separate. What's being complained about here goes beyond copying ideas, into copying expression.
I'm kind of surprised that anyone is actually surprised or offended by this kind of stuff. The US would be a backwater farming colony if it hadn't wholesale stolen the technologies that allowed New England to compete in the textile industry. That is only the most obvious example.
In general cloning is pretty bad. If I ripped off a popular iphone app, threw it on the app store, I'd be dilution the profit of the original creators and confusing users. I profit at everyone else's expense.
But there is a pretty good chance that Tumblr and Quora will soon be blocked in China. (All it takes is one blurb by one user on a sensitive issue, which is how Posterous and blogspot got blocked).
So if we assumed that
1) A product like Tumblr creates value for it's users
2) Tumblr will never be able to profit from China without the government/network connections
then cloning Tumblr seems like a win win scenario for everyone involved.
If doing a startup is about creating something users want(that doesn't exist yet or is not accessible for whatever reason), and the spirit of startups is to do things as efficiently and cheaply as possible, then isn't Diandian(the Tumblr clone) doing exactly what they are suppose to?
Disclaimer:
I founded a startup in Beijing a few months ago, and actually received seed funding from Kaifu's Innovation Works. I don't work for them, nor am I trying to defend anyone's actions(Come on guys... even the ICONS?). Just offering a different perspective from the other side of the the great firewall of China. ^^
These copy cat sites (and similar ones in Europe) are an interesting test to the "idea" vs. "execution" argument. I bet that there are other nearly perfect clones of Tumblr in China yet this one has risen to the top. I'm sure Kai-Fu Lee is looking beyond the ideas and at teams behind them.
Cloning might not be the most ethical way of building a product but clearly DianDian identified a market that wasn't being served in China and had the ability to bring a product to that market.
I love that the discussion of cloning was happening on "Zhihu, a clone of Quora".
> His first open letter in year 2000 to students titled About honesty and integrity.
This is the author's big conclusion? He just had to go snarky with it? The guy once wrote about honesty and integrity. That was TEN years ago; it's not some big scandal that he has now taken a couple products that were not available in the Chinese market and brought them to market as quickly as possible.
If you can get away with it, why not make your minimum-viable product a near-clone of an existing product that works but not in your market? That seems like a very sound strategy to me. Once he gets some traction and begins to see what improvements he should make in the context of his market, the product will begin to diverge.
If Tumblr wants to localize to China with an all-new Chumblr, then we can start fighting over IP theft. Until then, the guy is simply doing a service.
Blogs used to be superior to mainstream media because they gave the straight facts while avoiding the sensationalism that plagues modern day media. It's too bad the latest wave of bloggers are all wanna-be journalists.
Tumblr will have the last laugh here. There's practically no market for tasteful online advertising or paid software in China. So, while he might rack-up users it will be hard to monetize this.
Tencent is the second largest Internet company in the world, and it monetizes primarily through virtual goods, including blog themes. Chinese users don't buy software, but they do pay for online services.
I live in China (well, 40% of my time), work for a social network, and I think you're wrong.
Tumblr is sometimes blocked here, and I would bet that it's going to have the same destiny as Facebook and Twitter here.
The local Facebook clones work very well here, as does the local Twitter clone (that employs something like 500people). Meanwhile, the "originals" are blocked, and only people who can access internet through proxies or VPNs can access them.
Therefore, I don't really think of any reason why Tumblr would have the last laugh.
Not really, since Tumblr doesn't have any ads either. Come to think of it, besides selling premium themes, how else does Tumblr make money? Surely all the trust-fund hipsters on the site don't bring in wheelbarrows of money with their ironic 1-gear eco-bikes, do they?
I'm not so sure about this? Has tumblr gotten its way to profitability yet? I don't know.
I'm sure they will figure it out eventually, I'm just unsure whether they are going to have an easier time then this chinese clone(at least to the point where they will be pointing and laughing).
Lets not forget that tumblr has spent millions of dollars and years coming up with the mix of what makes tumblr work and it has been essentially copied wholesale, if this ends up working in a chinese market, thats a huge competitive advantage for the chinese clone, because they didn't have to spend any of that money or resources to begin with.
Why is Google mentioned in the headline? They have nothing to do with this story. Might as well list all of the schools this guy attended in the headline as well.
[+] [-] gyardley|15 years ago|reply
I am a little surprised to see this from as respected a person as Kai-Fu Lee, who I'd expect to be innovating, but you just have to shrug. This sort of thing happens in business, and it's not worth getting too excited about.
[+] [-] raymondhome|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iantimothy|15 years ago|reply
1. The Japanese Way - Innovate By Leapfrogging. 2. The Indian Way - Innovate By Piggybacking. 3. The Chinese Way - Innovate By Copying.
Looking at how things have been over the years, China isn't going to stop a strategy that has worked across industries.
[+] [-] plinkplonk|15 years ago|reply
probably this paper?( by the Lemelson-MIT program - warning pdf) http://web.mit.edu/invent/n-pressreleases/downloads/sustaina...
"Innovation to help achieve the goals of sustainable development can start in many ways, including: “copy-catting” (i.e. Japan, Korea and China first mimicking manufacturing techniques and then becoming world leaders.); “piggy-backing” (i.e. India performing service work for rich countries and adapting information technology to local needs); and “leap-frogging” (skipping over technologies that are inappropriate in a given place and time and adopting more sustainable solutions).
....................
“Copycats” imitate ideas, technologies and techniques from other countries and improve and adapt them. During its first few decades, the United States took the key secrets of the Industrial Revolution from England, Scotland and France and launched its own industrial economy. Two centuries later, Japan and then Korea developed by adapting American manufacturing, raising the quality and lowering costs. These days, China is doing it with much success, moving up the innovation ladder at a rapid rate.
“Piggybackers” ride on the backs of rich nations by doing more and more of their manufacturing and service work at far lower costs. India is practicing the art of piggybacking right now, using advanced computing and communications technologies to perform software development, tele-services, and even high-level innovation at a fraction of the labor costs compared to performing the same jobs in the United States or Western Europe. A recent study showed that one in ten U.S. software jobs will be exported to places like India and China over the next five years.
Finally, “leapfrogs” skip over inappropriate technologies and embrace new ones, such as Finland’s sudden break from Soviet domination and its rapid adoption and development of new inventions like wireless networks.
"
[+] [-] jhc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikstarck|15 years ago|reply
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-do-ebay-facebook-and-gro...
[+] [-] lindsayrgwatt|15 years ago|reply
I visited Berlin a while back and my buddy was telling me about a bunch of guys who've built a successful business (dozens of engineers) just cloning 'hot' American products.
It's got to reduce the number of people working on brand new ideas. (I'm not suggesting that you can't build a great business by copying somebody else's work, but you won't build a world-changing, super innovative company doing so)
[+] [-] trin_|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dailo10|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|15 years ago|reply
Windows (copying MacOS)
Lotus 1-2-3 (copying VisiCalc)
GNU/Linux (copying Unix)
Gosling Emacs (copying ITS and Multics Emacs), which eventually became GNU Emacs
Excel (copying Lotus 1-2-3, to the point that VisiCalc slash commands still work in Excel last time I tried them about five years ago)
OpenOffice (copying Microsoft Office)
C compilers everywhere (copying the original Unix C compiler)
Compaq's clone PC (copying the IBM PC, and giving rise to the entire IBM-compatible market)
Friendster (copying Sixdegrees)
Facebook (copying Friendster, somewhat less faithfully)
Every modern IDE (copying Turbo Pascal)
Every modern search engine (copying Google)
MS-DOS (copying CP/M and a little bit of Unix)
MercadoLibre (copying eBay)
Intel's current x64 CPU line (copying AMD)
Netscape (copying Mosaic)
Internet Explorer (copying Netscape)
Wordpress (copying Movable Type) (I'm not sure who to credit with the modern blog, with its comment threads, "after the jump", and permalinks. Pyra?)
Being able to copy the look and feel of competing products is crucially important to allowing innovation to continue. If Personal Software Inc. still had a monopoly on spreadsheets, it's a good bet that the spreadsheets we use today wouldn't have progressed much from where we were in 1984. The interface designs that seem innovative and unique today are either faddish crap or the baseline from which tomorrow's innovation begins.
[+] [-] jamesteow|15 years ago|reply
Many of your examples have the competitor creating a slightly different style, be it button style or menus. Open Office/Microsoft Office. Windows versus MacOS.
Hell, look at DuckDuckGo and Bing. Sure they are both search engines (just like Google) but they still have a slightly different visual identity and results page than Google.
HN is very similar to Reddit but still tries to do small things that differentiate it.
The original post looks like literal translation of Tumblr. Even if they changed the colors so that it fit with it's own identity I could agree with your point but this is not even close to being the case.
[+] [-] elliottcarlson|15 years ago|reply
Other than that - competition is good, and imitation should be seen as you are doing something good, now just make sure you can keep up or do it better consistently unless you want your competition to take over the market share.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|15 years ago|reply
LiveJournal had them all, no idea if it was the first (as you show, it doesn't matter much).
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raymondhome|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tyng|15 years ago|reply
But blatant copying?! Even the UI?! C'mon Kai-fu, I'm sure Innovation Work can do better than that. The whole purpose of Innovation Work (which is itself a copy of YC, for those of you who don't know) is to spur entrepreneurialism in the region, but all I see is setting up a very bad example. I can't imagine how the founders feel OWNERSHIP in their startups. It's more like a gold rush.
[+] [-] HardyLeung|15 years ago|reply
Disappointment aside, though, this strategy works. Take something that works, and apply to the China market. Why reinvent the wheel? But I'd argue that they should do a better job with "copying" -- you don't really want to invite criticism for no gain, unless the blatantness of copying is part of the strategy (to show investors that they literally and successfully cut-and-paste working startup businesses, like an assembly line).
Hmm, now that I think about it, perhaps that's the whole point.
[+] [-] wcsun|15 years ago|reply
http://fan.renren.it/a/ITxinwen/hulianwang/20110325/79864.ht...
[+] [-] michaelpinto|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hipchan|15 years ago|reply
I hope this means that all startups take the internationalization seriously from the beginning. Hopefully we can get some sort of solid services / startups / processes that can help internationalize companies much earlier on.
The current crop of localization services are frankly inadequate.
[+] [-] metageek|15 years ago|reply
There's a difference between ideas and the expression of those ideas; that's why patent and copyright are separate. What's being complained about here goes beyond copying ideas, into copying expression.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|15 years ago|reply
They never seem to copy the whole experience as a whole, as it seems to be with Chinese ones - but useful bits here and there.
On the other hand, when they don't copy they are accused of that anyway because for some reason Russians value precedence in tech highly.
In all the world the problem seems to boil down to: If there is a business model that works and the niche is vacant in their market, why innovate?
[+] [-] delackner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tstyle|15 years ago|reply
But there is a pretty good chance that Tumblr and Quora will soon be blocked in China. (All it takes is one blurb by one user on a sensitive issue, which is how Posterous and blogspot got blocked).
So if we assumed that
1) A product like Tumblr creates value for it's users 2) Tumblr will never be able to profit from China without the government/network connections
then cloning Tumblr seems like a win win scenario for everyone involved.
If doing a startup is about creating something users want(that doesn't exist yet or is not accessible for whatever reason), and the spirit of startups is to do things as efficiently and cheaply as possible, then isn't Diandian(the Tumblr clone) doing exactly what they are suppose to?
Disclaimer: I founded a startup in Beijing a few months ago, and actually received seed funding from Kaifu's Innovation Works. I don't work for them, nor am I trying to defend anyone's actions(Come on guys... even the ICONS?). Just offering a different perspective from the other side of the the great firewall of China. ^^
[+] [-] raymondhome|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dclaysmith|15 years ago|reply
Cloning might not be the most ethical way of building a product but clearly DianDian identified a market that wasn't being served in China and had the ability to bring a product to that market.
I love that the discussion of cloning was happening on "Zhihu, a clone of Quora".
[+] [-] BrandonM|15 years ago|reply
This is the author's big conclusion? He just had to go snarky with it? The guy once wrote about honesty and integrity. That was TEN years ago; it's not some big scandal that he has now taken a couple products that were not available in the Chinese market and brought them to market as quickly as possible.
If you can get away with it, why not make your minimum-viable product a near-clone of an existing product that works but not in your market? That seems like a very sound strategy to me. Once he gets some traction and begins to see what improvements he should make in the context of his market, the product will begin to diverge.
If Tumblr wants to localize to China with an all-new Chumblr, then we can start fighting over IP theft. Until then, the guy is simply doing a service.
Blogs used to be superior to mainstream media because they gave the straight facts while avoiding the sensationalism that plagues modern day media. It's too bad the latest wave of bloggers are all wanna-be journalists.
[+] [-] holdenc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blader|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uniclaude|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shii|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgrouchy|15 years ago|reply
I'm sure they will figure it out eventually, I'm just unsure whether they are going to have an easier time then this chinese clone(at least to the point where they will be pointing and laughing).
Lets not forget that tumblr has spent millions of dollars and years coming up with the mix of what makes tumblr work and it has been essentially copied wholesale, if this ends up working in a chinese market, thats a huge competitive advantage for the chinese clone, because they didn't have to spend any of that money or resources to begin with.
[+] [-] yannickmahe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est|15 years ago|reply
http://aodaren.com/copy-works
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickHull|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] joelandren|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jyothi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eneveu|15 years ago|reply