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How Will Samsung’s Latest Ideas Heist Affect Perceptions of Apple?
And What It Might Mean for Google.
The software market has for many years been built upon plagiarism. This isn’t an insult: good ideas deserve to impact the most people. And by far the most copied company in the last 25 years has been Apple.
Innovators across the home and mobile space, it was widely joked during the desktop wars that Apple were Microsoft’s R&D department. Having the smaller market share meant Cupertino had to rely on innovation and agility rather than scale to keep the lights on.
When Apple leapfrogged the entire tech industry with the iPhone it was only natural that copycats would soon appear because popularity breeds plagiarism. Indeed the very first internal versions of Android were originally designed to look and function like a BlackBerry, then the most popular range of smart handsets on the market.
Whilst no stranger to stealing ideas themselves, Apple and iOS have by and large had a large standing influence over how rival systems have developed. That is, until their biggest rival recently pivoted to someone else.
Knockoff Products 101
If I am a company looking to make a cheap buck the first thing I will do is make myself look as much like the market leader as…
