“Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And it’s creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-’90s way, when it’s a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.”
This is the #1 demotivator for me when it comes to software development. It’s an unreasonable fear and like all unreasonable fears it has to be overcome. Being afraid to do something because someone else will do it is simply stupid as is giving up when a big competitor comes on the scene. If they see it as a viable market then it’s actually an exceedingly viable market for the small business. You’ll have to fight against their ability to leverage market pressure and the two biggest issues there are going to be:
- They can offer for free what you’re selling
- The end user likely already has a login to their authentication system
Yes, it’s hard to fight against that kind of pressure but who told you that being an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) was going to be easy?
There are a lot of big company projects out there that start as skunkworks where someone has an idea and a project manager gives them enough rope to run for a while as long as they don’t step out of the yard. Google somewhat circumvents this with the 80:20 work week – 20% of the time you’re permitted to work on projects that interest you. It’s a sneaky way to use/abuse geeks who have a persistent work ethic (the things they love working on, that others would see as ‘work’, they see as enjoyment!). This kind of behaviour is why Google, though massive, still retains some agility and is able to throw out new and exciting stuff on a relatively regular interval. Compare this to Yahoo or Microsoft who haven’t given us anything interesting in years.
Just because Google has completely ripped off the look and feel of your app doesn’t mean you should stop. And that also goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, Yahoo or any of the other 900lb gorillas in the market. You’ve got a good product I hope, you have some first mover advantage (in that people have already been paying you money) and you’ve already been thinking of what to do next with your application (which means when some copycat clones you, you can wait, see the effect on sales and then release your planned upgrade).
That said: if you think you could lose 80% of your customer base to this new free service run by one of the big nasty companies out there and this would cause you to lose a significant percentage of income and endanger your company, then you need to start diversifying.
Nothing is harder on your laurels than sitting on them.
Awesome!