I think its just the nature of innovation. It takes 1/4 the effort to copy as to create new and this is true in marketing as well as engineering. Call it the second mover advantage, where someone else has already paid the cost of innovation, risk reduction and marketing (convincing people that they want x) and the second mover capitalizes on the new zeitgeist that they created but with lower overhead.
notacoward|4 years ago
That is in fact exactly what I called it when I wrote about this on my blog. It's definitely a part of how things happen "naturally" but that's also why I think VCs should act to counter it instead of magnifying it.