I take your point. I suppose what I was trying to say that having an idea about a product or technology is simpler than creating an implementation of that idea or a prototype. The copying aspect though does tend to have the benefit of looking at what worked well and what didn't such as .Net copying Java but trying to avoid what didn't work well (though potentially introducing some other new things that don't work well). I don't have any figures. I don't know if anyone on here has access to any. Even for Microsoft copying ideas from Java to make .Net I still think the development of it would have cost Microsoft a great deal. The research and development is less costly due to starting from something existing known concept but the coding is still being done from scratch and the libraries and APIs are all different anyway.
I think the principle can vary a lot from what is being copied. For example if it is an interaction style that others have developed from a long series of prototype experiment with test users until and effective technique is found then it would save the copying company because the effective interaction style was developed by others. Other kinds of development, in particular behind the scenes code with no UI and black box libraries might well still involve a similar development cost each time a separate company has to development (if they don't know anything about any other company's implementation. On Aug 8, 3:59 pm, "Vince O'Sullivan" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Aug 8, 1:39 pm, Carl Jokl <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Ideas are cheap, implementations are expensive. > > Do you have any figures to back this up? My intuition says that > (successful and repeated) innovation is way more expensive than > implementation and imitation. > > > People would not buy Android phones if they didn't offer > > something that the iPhone didn't even if that is a more competitive > > price. > > Of course they would. People aren't stupid. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
