Title: Competitive Reproduction
Author: Alex Kirk
Published: October 9, 2005

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# Competitive Reproduction

October 9, 2005

We’ve seen it serveral times in history. Company A launches a new, innovative product
and company B takes it, copies it and wins the competition.

Not that we have come so far in just such a short time of AJAX apps but there are
quite a few examples:

 * **RSS readers:** [Bloglines](http://www.bloglines.com/) (acquired by [AskJeeves](http://ask.com/)),
   [Rojo](http://www.rojo.com/), [BackBase](http://www.backbase.com/), [Pluck](http://www.pluck.com/),
   the newly launched [Google Reader](http://reader.google.com/), …
 * **Bookmarking:** [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us/), [furl](http://www.furl.net/)(
   [LookSmart](http://www.looksmart.com/)), [de.lirio.us](http://de.lirio.us/), 
   [digg](http://www.digg.com/), …
 * **Starting Pages:** [start.com](http://www.start.com/) (Microsoft), [Google Personal](http://www.google.com/ig),
   [My Yahoo](http://my.yahoo.com/), [Netvibes](http://www.netvibes.com/), …
 * **Writing apps:** [Writely](http://www.writely.com/), [Writeboard](http://www.writeboard.com/),
   [Jotspot Live](http://jotlive.com/), [Zoho Writer](http://www.zohowriter.com/),…

A nice conversation or rather a little fight on words has started between the listed
writing apps: an article in [TechCrunch reported about Zoho Writer](http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/10/02/zoho-writers-ajax-word-processor/).
In the comments for this article Jason Fried of 37signals (author of Writeboard)
and Sam Schillace (from Writely) seem very annoyed about “such blatant rips”.

But haven’t we seen this earlier? Competition keeps the market alive. You cannot
rest on your laurels. You have to prove that you deserve the predominant position.
So if such a competitior beats you with your own product you have done something
wrong, or simply waited to long. See IBM vs. Microsoft 1980, Microsoft vs. Google
2005. If you’re better anyway you don’t have to fear a thing.

Some interesting thoughts about this can be found at [Bokardo: Web-based Office Competition Heats Up](http://bokardo.com/archives/web-based-office-competition-heats-up/).

[Web](https://alex.kirk.at/category/web/)

Read this next

[Office Web Apps are just Proof-of-Concepts](https://alex.kirk.at/2005/10/08/office-web-apps-are-just-proof-of-concepts/)

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