22 Responses to “Innovation is dead: The History of Copycats”

• bill
  February 5th, 2006
  11:32 pm
  
  

  pepsi came after coke. walmart came after kmart. dell came after ibm. toyota came after
  chevy. just because you do it first doesn’t mean you do it best.

• Noah Kagan
  February 5th, 2006
  11:38 pm
  
  

  i knew those comments would start appearing how pepsi v coke and other companies. I am not debating that new companies can’t take something old and make it better, I am saying 2 things:

  1- The new companies are not really doing anything that much better than the old companies
  2- Recently, no companies have come out with anything revolutionary.

• stephen dolenc
  February 5th, 2006
  11:51 pm
  
  

  let’s not forget the xerox > apple > windows > linux distros…

• stephen dolenc
  February 5th, 2006
  11:51 pm
  
  

  and let’s not forget the browsers too. mozaic > netscape > ie > mozilla > firefox > ie7 > etc.

• Cap
  February 6th, 2006
  12:18 am
  
  

  yeah I haven’t seen anything really new lately (2-3 years?)

  it’s like, “Okay thats really cool. but do I need another site like this?”

  even with Google and Yahoo.. they bring out so much service and products that its difficult to keep up.. everytime I find out about something “new” on the web.. some jerk will come along and say “oh thats been out for a long time now, you moron.”

  I’m going to go with Yahoo. For whatever reason I use it more than Google since 1995.

• Shivani
  February 6th, 2006
  12:56 am
  
  

  Having worked with you for a while now, i think you should start taking your own advice.

• dk
  February 6th, 2006
  1:13 am
  
  

  I’m reminded of a quote from a very old slashdot discussion. (http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/19/1155258)

  “[T]o us in the tech field, the biotech revolution, to use your example, seems slow-paced, but that’s because we’re watching it happen. To the common man on the street, who doesn’t hear about these advances very often, he’s amazed that the scientists were able to do it that easily, simply because he didn’t see the piles of rejected ideas that were unfeasable.”

• Noah Kagan
  February 6th, 2006
  2:57 am
  
  

  Shivani, whats up with all the hating? Did i just get served:)

• SA Blog
  February 6th, 2006
  3:46 am
  
  

  One could look at the situation from a different perspective. Innovation has been the driving force behind many WEB 2.0 developments and the problem may be that the internet has given copycats a platform to easily duplicate things.

• TKM
  February 6th, 2006
  4:52 am
  
  

  You put Google as your last holy grail. However…

  InfoSeek -> Altavista -> WebCrawler -> Google
  Hotmail -> Yahoo Mail -> GMail
  Mapquest -> Yahoo Maps -> Google Maps
  USENET -> ONElist -> eGroups -> YahooGroups -> Google Groups
  Technorati -> Google Blog Search

  I could go on…

  Exactly how is Google launching brand-new services? Are you sure you’re not debating how new companies can’t take something old and make it better? That’s Google for me.

• Jakob Lodwick
  February 6th, 2006
  5:38 am
  
  

  Noah! You let me down for the first time

  Vimeo came before all those other video sharing sites. Check the del.icio.us records for each site.

• Rob
  February 6th, 2006
  7:00 am
  
  

  Noah,
  I think some the problem lies in marketing. It is much easier to convince consumers to use something they already know. So the most successful products are those that take a familiar concept and tweak it.

  True paradigm-breaking products take longer to catch on.

• Noah Brier
  February 6th, 2006
  7:06 am
  
  

  Personally del.icio.us was the last service to completely change the way I use the web (although you could argue Firefox as well). I guess I don’t agree that small increases in functionality doesn’t make something innovative. To me Facebook’s only allowing college students to sign up was a huge innovation over Friendster’s let-the-world-in mentality.

  Further, what would you say about web-based email? Gmail is really just a copycat of hotmail, but it’s certainly a huge innovation: you can’t even compare the two.

  Also, just getting back to your question for a second, there aren’t that many sites that change people’s lives. If there were they wouldn’t really be life changing. The sites that make up my web life are: Google, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Gmail and NoahBrier.com (my site). Speaking of which, what about blog software, certainly Wordpress has changed your life since Google has, no? (Yeah, I know it’s stretching the rules a little, but hey.)

• Damon Z
  February 6th, 2006
  10:35 am
  
  

  Things work in cycle, the end of innovation only announces a soon to be burst of new websites :). I came across an interesting one called Standpoint, http://www.standpoint.com/index.php , it’s no google or yahoo but it’s interesting.

• Yali Friedman
  February 6th, 2006
  11:58 am
  
  

  I’d like to cite a source from under your own roof: Web Services in the Mist: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2006/01/web_services_in.html

  As a biochemist, I found the analogy of the similarity of human and chimpanzee genome content and web 2.0 infrastructure illuminating.

  What we’re seeing here isn’t a lack of innovation, but rather evolutionary instead of revolutionary change. Successive companies are refining the models until something hits. Sure there’s a lot of questionable progress, but revolutionary changes also exhibit this (eg. pet rocks, drinking birds, and singing fish were a real departure from other novelty retail products, but didn’t have any ‘legs’).

  From a 30,000 foot view, it’s better to refine existing, but imperfect, models than to reinvent the wheel each time. So many people haven’t heard of blogs, rss, flickr, or tagging yet. Why invent yet new paradigms before these can harden and mature into concepts that become widely adopted?

• Aaron
  February 6th, 2006
  12:39 pm
  
  

  It’s very hard to tell if this is criticism of the followers. I think you have failed to label your followers as either me-toos or re-innovators. Also, can’t quite make out the timeline of your lists… are you saying that webshots came after flickr? and where does ofoto fit into the mix in this case? I will take our own situation, for example; if the online storage market had been left alone, consumers would be faced with:

  http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=xdrive+problems&btnG=Search+Blogs

  Sometimes you need to see what someone did wrong, before you can do something right.

  -Aaron

• Cap
  February 6th, 2006
  1:36 pm
  
  

  thats a good mention. word press, typepad, blogger, etc. are good stuff. they certainly have changed life for some of us, in a sense.

  and oh yeah, how can I forget… wikipedia! it’s still pretty new I guess. 5 years now? I guess thats the last site where I think “omg this is awesome.”

• dreams
  February 6th, 2006
  6:22 pm
  
  

  Hmmm, The Jan/Feb issue of B2.0 has an article entitled ‘Start Last, Finish First’ which echos the same sentiment: now is a good time, as an entrepreneur, to challenge the leaders.

  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/01/01/8368119/

• Bob Uhl
  February 7th, 2006
  10:45 pm
  
  

  Actually, I think that reddit is a bigger thing than del.icio.us, and different from it as well. del.icio.us merely gave me a new way to deal with my bookmarks, and some sites (e.g. tribe.net–which incidentally would be my favourite social networking site, were it not for the small audience and the preponderance of Really Strange Burning Man Fans) take advantage of that in cool ways, sure. But reddit has completely changed the way I go about my daily webbing. The vast majority of my blog entries these days are cool things I saw thereon; the news sites which I used formerly are contributing much less than previously. Indeed, it’s amusing to see how a reddit entry can appear days later–or in one notable case, two reddit entries were combined into one idea on a decidedly non-technical website.

  So I’d say that from my perspective we’re getting a nice series of Cool New Sites. Google, Flickr, del.icio.us, reddit. Now if only I could find social networking with the technical savvy of tribe.net but the audience of friendster or myspace…

• Robert G
  February 8th, 2006
  11:46 am
  
  

  What about the RSS Readers? Which one came first?

  Bloglines has definately changed the way I use the internet.

  Also, TKM, shouldn’t Yahoo come before infoseek.?

• Scott Rafer
  February 15th, 2006
  10:08 am
  
  

  Friendster explicitly copied Ryze. Jonathan seems to have gotten Adrian’s blessing to do so. Now that Adrian is re-investing in Ryze, from his new HQ in Panama, I’d watch for it to rise back up.

• Ryan Green
  February 16th, 2006
  8:21 am
  
  

  I would not equate Picasa to Flickr at all, for a couple of reasons. First, the obvious: one is web-based, and the other is local. Flickr is about sharing your photos with others, picasa is for organizing ALL your pictures, public or private. Plus, there’s no bandwidth limit on picasa, only your HD. Flickr is for-pay

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