Copycats ⇥

Spot-on analysis by Matt Gemmell of the oft-unoriginal world of tech product design:

You’ve essentially guaranteed that every buying decision comes bundled with a kernel of regret, maybe because they didn’t have enough money, or needed a floppy disk drive, or were tied into a phone carrier contract for another year and couldn’t get the handset they’d prefer. Your product can never be ideal for its target market, because you’ve deliberately defined it in terms of someone else’s.

The lesson of the technology industry in the past five years is that really successful products dare to NOT copy. They’re pure, in that they’re actually designed from first principles – they’re based on the problem and the constraints, without being viewed through the lens of someone’s existing attempt.