The idea of a business is to produce profit. Where this profit comes from, doesn’t matter to some companies. Especially IT and technology companies, certain companies seem to think that if they can’t produce a better effort at making something, then they should just copy their competitors product. Most of all it shows terrible plagerism but it also shows how bad the designers are of the copying company if they can’t seem to come up with their own idea for a product. Bear in mind though, certain features wouldn’t be copied unless they worked well and were profitable in some form or other to the company. So it could even be a compliment…
The two main companies that I am focusing on here are Samsung and Creative, both Korean technology companies that are trying to get a share of the Portable Music player boom, or to put it in better words, ‘Take a bite of the Apple.’ Firstly Samsung, inept at creating its own headphones has gone along and virtually copied Apple’s iPod headphones. Samsung’s headphones (I’d get a pic if I could) which they bundle with various MP3 players look incredibly similar to iPod headphones. First of all, they’re white. Fair enough loads of companies started producing white headphones after the iPod, secondly if not for the small silver protruding bit on the top, they would be identical. That might possibly be why there are no photos on their website, fear of a lawsuit anyone?, but who knows.
On top of Samsung, Creative, through their lines of substandard MP3 players originally began to copy the iPod’s navigation system, through the touch sensitive pad, but that really isn’t that bad as it is hardly similar and hardly works as good when there is a limit to how far your finger can move on the pad and there are no integrated buttons. What was considerably more wrong was copying the iPod’s user interface, which worked very nicely may I add and did put the iPod in a level above the competitors, and then attempted to pull it off as their own interface by trying to license it. How low can you get? Firstly copying part of someone elses product, then trying to claim it as your own by licensing it! Business is a nasty place, and sometimes, people have to do wrong things in order to succeed.
Companies like Creative, Samsung, iRiver (shit, what an original name) and Cowon (with their iAudio series of players, also with an incredibly original name) try their luck at beating Apple’s dominace thru the integration of many features, of which most are useless or substandard but also is terrible considering that they haven’t just made a sucessful music player on its own yet… Understanding this, then reading part of the Apple Human User Interface Guidelines, possibly gives an insight into why the iPod is so sucessful…
The best products aren’t the ones with the most features. The best products are those whose features are tightly integrated with the solutions they provide, making them the most usable.
Strangely enough, it seems to be true.