I might be at odds with the crowd here. But why wouldn't you copy (especially if you are in an environment where you can get away with it)
Isn't "copying" / "cloning" the greatest hack of all? Billions of dollars have gone into the design of smartphones. Why would you go and invest more and play the catchup game? in something that established players are very good at?
The innovation of xiaomi is not in smartphone itself. But how it is manufactured to achieve such value and the process which it is sold.
So if I put it in terms that startup people that find acceptable: cloning apple is just an great bootstrap mechanism. They are hugely profitable on the back of apple's marketing budget.
If they achieve greater prominence globally, they inevitably will have to innovate on the phone itself, but then they will also have the budget to do so.
In the pro audio world, this very scenario has unfolded over the past 10 years or so. The Behringer Corporation got their start by cloning the designs of manufacturers like Roland and QSC. One could read a great deal of contempt for their strategy on enthusiast message boards; indeed in the beginning Behringer's quality may not have been outstanding, but their prices were superb. Behringer managed to bootstrap themselves through this process of copying the designs of their competitors; eventually they became large enough that they bought up many of their competitors and are now making a great deal of money on new designs of their own, like the X32 Mixer.
Something smells funny about doing business this way, but although they are certainly not a beloved brand in the industry, I suspect that within 10 or 20 years their consumers will have mostly forgotten about their dubious start and will consider them like any other brand. I'm not sure what the takeaway is here but its an interesting case to study.
While cloning makes sense to an individual actor, it has a harmful effect on the market overall. If cloning is rampant, then innovation is discouraged. Why spend the time and resources to find things out for yourself when you can just wait for some other schmuck to figure it out and then copy them? Of course as this process continues, there are fewer and fewer schmucks who will feel the need to create thoughtful, carefully-considered products.
Copying can be discouraged through legal means, but the results are usually unsatisfactory (witness our ongoing strife over technology patents). A culture where copying is viewed as shameful has the advantage that most situations never need to devolve into actual legal action. Companies will voluntarily avoid copying one another (in an obvious or crass manner) to avoid damaging their brand.
In what other context does pride preclude using others' works? Certainly not in Science, Mathematics or Engineering. It's the right thing to do in most other contexts - you stand on shoulders of giants.
I don't know I just feel that attempting to photocopy something because you lack passion and you're too cheap to spend time and money on r&d is different from using someone else's work (that they've shared) to make something better. It's the difference between doing something to get rich and doing something because you love doing it, and making something big; something worth being proud of.
This said, I know the culture in Asia so I don't blame the individual. (Personally when I first got here to the States, a lot of things were a culture shock.) Things are very different in Asia for both better and worse. Blatant copying is just one of the worse aspects which is a symptom of a bigger problem. What do you expect in terms of creativity from a country of drones who work to produce more homogenous drones? What do you expect from drones who don't value anything other than money (and family)? There's no pride in being great and making something great, which is different than just being rich. Unless things change culturally, this is why China has a very low chance of making anything awesome, unless they copy Singapore where they import the West's talent and creativity, then the odds improve a little.
There's definitely a cultural thing at play- based on how companies behave, I feel like it's more socially acceptable in China to copy. In the west, there's a huge stigma around it: for example copying in school is one of the worst offense you can commit- whereas I remember in grad school, all the chinese students would group up together before class and cross-check their answers with one another. This is anecdotal, but I feel like it lines up with what we see on the corporate side of things, and it makes sense that in a Confucian culture copying would be more acceptable than in the individualistic western cultures.
That being said, I think it's a losing strategy in the long run for consumer devices manufacturers. In the short term it's definitely a gain- your phones are way better than they would be otherwise, because you're mimicking the best. However, Apple puts a lot of thought in its designs, and you can bet some of it is long term thinking (e.g. designing components/molds/etc. a certain way even if it's a bit more expensive because you can reuse them for other devices). When you're simply copying, you don't have access to all of these hidden variables, and it makes it very hard for you to build a viable long term strategy.
It's definitely possible to copy competition in order to get the process etc. right, and then to spin off and start being original yourself - see a lot of Japanese electronics companies from the 70s/80s/90s, for instance. That being said, it's not easy to pull off, and it means you need internal designers who can come up with something better than what you've been copying all along. We'll see if that's the case for Xiaomi.
Side question: are there famous, internationally recognized Chinese industrial designers? (along the lines of Dieter Rams, Jony Ive, etc.) I feel like I've never heard of any, but I can't tell if it's because the talent isn't there, or because the western media never reports on them, or because it's more of a collective culture where there wouldn't be the potential for a single individual to rise, or something else altogether. In a general manner, I'd love to read more about what being a designer is like in the more group-minded Asian cultures.
Brain-wise, I think all nations have the possibility to have some top achievers at any given field. It comes easier when the population is larger. The human beings' organizations come with so many system differences such as ways to cooperate, education system. I recommend to think from a system's perspective. If copy is a way to catch up and serve as the basis for evolving one‘s own true strengths (well, true strength here makes the difference), it's definitely a good thing. If copy only brings almost brain-dead repetition, even others can not stop it, it will implode in the end.
Sorry to reply with such an abstract content. There are just too many things in my mind to say. So I try to provide some general ideas instead of be very specific. BTW, I do not like taking culture as a dimension of answer, since it's too general and culture is the symptom of an organization. When we talk about culture, we just has to accept the symptom of one organization as is. Hence, it brings us not much information. But it is extremely difficult to have some nice insights for culture we don't have enough context with.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the Chinese do not aim to copy complete designs - they reproduce the aspects that they like, omit what they don't, and then improve upon them with what consumers want. It's a very practical and pragmatic way to innovate. A lot of Chinese like the "Apple style", in terms of appearance, but not the price nor lock-in. This is why cloners have been successful in producing iPhone-lookalikes with removable batteries, dual SIM, expandable storage, larger displays, microUSB, and Android (look at e.g. the Jiayu G5) - the users are not after the complete Apple experience, they just want something that looks like an iPhone with all the standard features found on many other handsets that a real iPhone doesn't have.
Also, the concept of vendor lock-in doesn't take hold as easily in a culture where copying is the norm - attempts to create new, incompatible proprietary standards will either fail if there is no significant advantage (the users will just avoid your product), or if there is a clear advantage, everyone else will soon have copied it. Some will say this limits innovation but I see it more as innovation happening slowly and more naturally to meet user's needs, as opposed to being forced.
This is not a cultural thing. It's just a stage in the country's industrial development. Once upon a time (when most people on HN were not alive) Japan was the country that rolled out cheap knock offs.
Then, once they became good enough at it, they graduated to the stage of out-innovating the industries they were previously rolling out cheap knock offs for.
Many western countries including America followed the same cycle during the industrial revolution(s).
>That being said, I think it's a losing strategy in the long run for consumer devices manufacturers
It's not a long run strategy for China any more than it was for Japan. It's not even a strategy, really - it's more of a "market configuration", actually.
Chinese companies have a currency advantage but less capital and brand equity available to take riskier (innovative) gambles. So it makes sense to go the cheap knockoff route. Once they have brand equity, capital reserves and have lost their currency advantage they will out-innovate or they will die.
They're already a long way along this road. A "Xiaomi" would never have happened 5 years ago. The idea that a Chinese company could rival the industrial design of an Apple phone was seen as something close to laughable. 10 years ago they could barely even consider designing a smartphone at all.
CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts) near my apartment has a decent industrial design department. Chinese companies are also willing to employ international talent, and competition for jobs in the field of industrial design is tight enough that they have no problem filling those roles decently (too many kids what to be Ives).
whereas I remember in grad school, all the chinese students would group up together before class and cross-check their answers with one another.
I remember in school all the engineering students would group up together before class and cross-check their answers with one another. It makes sense to me. They were pretty tight-knit, studied together and took the same classes all the time.
I am using a Xiaomi “Redmi” (??) in Taiwan. I was blown away by the interface they cooked up — it’s the slickest Android UI I have seen so far. It definitely takes cues from Apple, but I also feel that Xiaomi has done some solid design work of their own — for instance, the icons for basic functions and system apps are original and quite effective.
But in other areas it doesn’t come close to Apple. The hardware looks and feels more like some of the midrange LG phones I’ve used in the past, and compares poorly not only to the iPhone but also recent Samsung and HTC phones. I’ve also discovered a lot of buggy behavior that I’ve never seen in any Android device, including an inability to delete photos (the dialog reports I don’t have permission) or apply system updates.
I been following xiaomi ever since the first MI phone but the company seems to be losing its mojo. Its not the appleism thing because that was always there, ever since they made that android fork that emulates a lot of iOS UX.
No, the company seems to be at a crossroads: other firms like Oppo have overtaken it in breaking into the international market, which is ironic since xiaomi was the first chinese electronic firm anyone outside China cared about. At the same time they keep delaying a proper international rollout while trying to compete in the cutthroat bargain phone market in Asia were you have literally hundreds of brands making all kinds of stuff at incredible prices and very thin profits.
In short, its trying to be premium and affordable at the same time, and differentiate from regular android while still being android because it lacks the capacity to develop and support its own OS.
I don't care about how they copy apple because lets be honest everybody does, even apple copies other companies, because you have to be a stubborn idiot to miss a business opportunity for the sake of originality. If you that you go broke, and businesses are constantly doing and imitating whatever is successful. Does a dubstep BGM in an ad help sales? then we are using dubstep, end of story.
We would not be talking about Xiaomi had it just been a copycat company.
The article has a set of fairly manipulative images (that I bet you could do similarly with every other mobile phone brand) and even takes Lei Jun quoting Steve Jobs' "One more thing ..." as a sign of copycatting where it is clearly a homage/tribute.
The article also does not mention Xiaomi fairly innovative software service business model. Described ie. here:
But isn't being seen as an Apple 'clone' a huge win for the company? In China, Xiaomi is distinguishing themselves from their competitors by being consistently associated in the same sentence as Apple, whereas the others are 'just Android'. It would be a PR coup for Xiaomi to be actually sued by Apple : They'd be constantly in the news as being seen as comparable to the most prestigious brand available. Xiaomi doesn't mind the controversy : It all reinforces the idea that their brand is in Apple's style-bracket.
This is quite a challenge to Apple - compete with a chinese firm without resorting to an army of lawyers. Apple has already made a nice pile of money selling iphones, time to invent or face powerful competition that doesn't fear US patent system.
There is a ground rule: If people are buying it, cash is coming in.
As long as that is happening, in the cellphone industry, no one gives a damn, if someone "mashes up" some designs. That has been the case way before Xiomi came around, as this habit was started by others. The interesting thing would be, how Xiomi would compete in US market, with Apple/Samsung/Nokia.
Can Xiomi pick out a rabbit or two from under the hat?
Isn't "copying" / "cloning" the greatest hack of all? Billions of dollars have gone into the design of smartphones. Why would you go and invest more and play the catchup game? in something that established players are very good at?
The innovation of xiaomi is not in smartphone itself. But how it is manufactured to achieve such value and the process which it is sold.
So if I put it in terms that startup people that find acceptable: cloning apple is just an great bootstrap mechanism. They are hugely profitable on the back of apple's marketing budget.
If they achieve greater prominence globally, they inevitably will have to innovate on the phone itself, but then they will also have the budget to do so.
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