I had an interesting conversation at work yesterday. A lot of news was coming out about the new Windows Phone 7 Series operating system and someone mentioned that they were surprised that we won’t start seeing the phones until around the end of this year.
“Doesn’t that give competitors a chance to copy what they are doing?”
I said that I didn’t think so and gave my reasoning, which caused another employee to accuse me of being an Apple commercial. Not exactly. My thoughts aren’t so much about Apple as they are about creativity and copycats.
No one can deny the impact the iPhone has had on the mobile phone market. Apple came in and set a new standard and soon afterward everyone tried to copy what they had done.
Companies began to say, “Now everyone is going to want touch phones. We’d better start making touch phones or we’ll be left behind.”
So what did they start doing? They started making touch phones. And what better way to push a touch phone to market quickly than to make an iPhone knock-off. After all, they seem to know what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, just because something looks like something else, doesn’t make it as good as something else. It’s like a guy who can’t get the hot girl, so he settles for a robot girl. She may look just as good, but the wiring is off.
Apple has put a lot of time, effort, and shall we say, love, into making the iPhone relevant. You can’t copy that unless you are willing to put in the time. Amazingly, Microsoft has done that.
They didn’t set out to copy the iPhone OS. They built their own thing from the ground up. Personally, I was glad to see it. Seth Godin talks about this concept a lot in his new book and I agree with him. There are too many companies making cheap and quick knockoffs instead of striving to make rare art.
After spending years in the museum observing, it looks like Microsoft finally decided to finally pick up a brush and start painting.