I have little patience for copycats, especially the copy-to-China variety: whatever works abroad gets rebuilt at home, sometimes without a single pixel changed. The CSS stays the same, the images stay the same; some even hotlink assets from the site they copied, and the most brazen lift the source code outright. Examples people cite include Tencent copying Sina's code and Sina copying Twitter's source. That is not competition. It is contemptible.
When people invited me to answer questions on a Quora clone, I declined, and I will say it again here: I will not participate. Some responded that I am a hypocrite because I use Sina Weibo, which they call a Twitter clone. But Weibo and Twitter share a product idea while differing in implementation. Weibo has features Twitter does not, and in some respects I think Weibo does things better. Each has strengths. I do not regard that as crossing the line into the kind of copying I object to.
My personal test is simple. First, you can copy an idea or a function, but if you also copy the interface, the code, the images, the visual style, the layout—the whole surface—I will hold you in contempt. Second, you can imitate a product, but your starting point should be that the original did something badly and you can do it better. If your starting point is simply to reproduce and clone, you get the same contempt. That is why I do not go to the clone versions of Quora, Stack Overflow, Facebook, or Google. They fail both tests: they copy wholesale, and they copy badly.
There is a more rational side to this. I do not believe ideas should be treated as private property. Good ideas should not be monopolized; they should be released so other people can build on them. You make a web server, someone else can make a web server. You make forum software, someone else can make forum software. You make a phone, someone else can make a phone. You make a portable computer, someone else can make a portable computer. You make a messaging app, someone else can make a messaging app. The better a product or an approach is, the more likely it is to be studied and imitated.
Interfaces are trickier. Legally, individual elements such as menus, buttons, layout, and color schemes may not be protected, but the interface as a whole can be. You should not make your product's interface look identical to someone else's. Designs and layouts with artistic character can also be protected. This is why we expect differences: televisions may look similar, even their remotes may look similar, but their menus and functions differ. Family cars share a general shape but not the same lines and proportions. Unix and Linux have nearly identical user interfaces, but their internals and capabilities differ—file systems, kernel management, and so on. MacOS, Windows, X-Win, Gnome, and KDE are all desktop systems in the same broad family, yet their implementations and details are not the same.
Some people will call this micro-innovation. I do not care much for the label. The value judgment is simple: if a copy is legal and the copy is actually better than the original, I will accept it and I will pay for it.
The broader point is not complicated. Good things attract study and imitation, and imitation can introduce competition, and competition can make the thing better. Do not be afraid of being copied. Being copied is evidence that you did something well. If a copycat overtakes you, look at yourself first instead of blaming the copycat.
Then there is Tencent. A lot of people in the Chinese internet industry ask the same anxious question: Tencent is everywhere; whatever I build, it can enter the market and crush me. Investors ask startup teams, 'What will you do if Tencent copies you?'
The useful way to think about Tencent is not as an invincible monster but as a mirror. Its large-scale copying has one social effect: it forces startup teams to abandon pure copying, and even to abandon business-model projects that are easy to replicate. It pushes them to ask how they can avoid being copied and what their core value really is. Tencent makes the cruelty of startups clearer. It makes the difference between a real product and a feature clearer. If you are tempted by short-term opportunism, remember the penguin: it has money, people, distribution, and plenty of short-term opportunism of its own.
Tencent's product lines are a clue. QQ, WeChat, Qzone, groups, Weibo, friends—many of these products are almost identical in function. That suggests a few things. The company has so many people that it can work on everything. Product teams want to avoid risk by attaching themselves to QQ's success, so they struggle to innovate. Internal competition is fierce, technical teams work overtime, and the result is a broad net thrown without much direction.
Tencent also has weaknesses. At least three kinds of products are hard for it to copy. The first is a product with heavy offline operations: e-commerce needs suppliers, warehouses, logistics, and physical processes that cannot be cloned by software alone. The second is a high-quality, valuable, authoritative community: Douban, Stack Overflow, and Quora are examples. The third is a product with real technical depth, where technology matters more than business operations: Nginx, MySQL, Android/iOS, and similar systems.
Tencent is not the scariest thing. The scarier thing is failing to think and observe, or chasing quick money without looking for something valuable to build. If what you are building can be built quickly, do not expect to avoid copycats. If you think short-term, you will face a crowd of imitators and they can bury you. If you think long-term and build something that takes three to five years of serious effort to mature, the opportunistic copycats will give up. The sentence 'this takes three to five years' violates their value system, and that alone removes about ninety percent of your competitors.
This brings up the question of what a real product is. Many startup teams treat a function as a product, which leaves the door wide open for imitators: photo-sharing apps, cloud storage and sharing tools like Dropbox and Evernote, travel apps. In my view these are not yet real products, which is why they have so many imitators. I am not saying a function can never be a product. I am saying such a product is not durable, not strongly sustainable, and easy to replace. Even Instagram, Dropbox, and Evernote—imagine Apple or Canon integrating Instagram-like functions into their camera software, or an operating system integrating Dropbox or Evernote into the OS. I am not predicting that this will happen. I am asking you to consider the weakness of a product that is essentially a feature.
A real product, as I see it, has several qualities.
It is an end-to-end solution. In e-reading, that means the whole chain: buying a book, reading it, sharing notes, and recommending books. Apple's products are a good illustration of what an end-to-end solution looks like.
It is valuable. You can get valuable content from it, and you can use it to create something valuable yourself. Douban, Stack Overflow, and communities like Twitter and Weibo—which make information more equal and move it faster—fit this. So do AWS and Apple's developer platform. You cannot get anything valuable from QQ, and you cannot create anything valuable through QQ.
It interacts with society and can evolve. Users contribute valuable content. It has open interfaces that make integration with other systems easy. It forms an ecosystem that can support itself, circulate internally, manage itself, and evolve. Tencent's user base has not contributed much of value to the platform, let alone helped Tencent evolve.
It embodies quality. Quality means that using the product gives you a feeling of standing, a sense of a higher level. People use branded smartphones instead of knockoffs, and laptops like ThinkPad or MacBook, or an iPad, because those products convey quality. Using QQ conveys no such feeling. You do not put a QQ number on your resume, and you do not use QQ in business settings. It is like taking guests to dinner: you choose a restaurant with some quality, not a noodle stall.
When you aim your product at that level, two things happen. Copycats cannot keep up with you, and they have almost no way to replicate you. They can copy the surface, but they cannot copy the essence.
The genes of the copycat—short-term opportunism—make real copying impossible. And the genes of QQ's user base make it impossible for Tencent to reproduce Douban or Stack Overflow. That is the advantage worth building.