On AcerCloud and cloning every idea Apple comes up with, but offering nothing new
Not content with churning out yet another in a long line of MacBook Air clones, Acer’s announced AcerCloud. To be fair, apart from the functionality and Steve Jobs’s presentation, Acer’s service is pretty much nothing like Apple’s. If we totally ignore its PicStream feature, which is nothing at all like Photo Stream, honest, and the ’30 days’ content stream, which is totally different to Apple’s ’30 days’ content stream, it’s like an entirely new thing. Which essentially means Acer used a slightly different shade of blue in its slides.
Look, I know Apple didn’t invent cloud services. I’m not stupid. But this cloning thing is just crazy. What does Acer hope to achieve with this, bar some short-term press and also quite a bit of ridicule? Unlike Apple, it cannot back iCloud with a content ecosystem. More to the point, it’s offering nothing new, something shared by the vast majority of companies in tech.
Perhaps waiting to see what Apple does and copying it will remain a viable strategy for these companies. But the one thing they should be trying to copy is Apple’s ability to iterate. Apple has rarely invented new things, but it has taken existing systems and heavily reworked them. It didn’t invent computers, but the Apple II brought a number of features to home computing that hadn’t before been widely available, in a system that was relatively simple to use. It didn’t invent WIMP-based computing, but Mac OS moved on concepts invented at XEROX in a big way.
MP3 players existed before the iPod, but it was Apple’s device that propelled them into the mainstream, largely through thinking how they should be done, not how they were already done. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but it was the first to make one that was a pleasure to use, and that you didn’t want to hurl out of the window, in a desperate hope of hitting one of the UI designers. And Apple didn’t invent the tablet, but it sure feels like that sometimes with the iPad, which was the first of these devices to really work in a seamless fashion.
The first company to start innovating and iterating really has a big chance of grabbing more of the space Apple’s nabbed—not only in sales but also in grabbing headlines for doing new things, rather than just ripping off something that exists. There will be a diminishing space for other players, where only the giants will remain (Samsung, Dell, and so on). Everyone else is, in the long term, screwed—and they only have themselves to blame, the copycats.
Hat-tip: The Verge.
*nods*
Amazing that the only refinement they seem to have made is a slightly crappier looking cloud logo. I’ll never know because I’m very unlikely to give it a fair hearing or actually try it, but my guess is that’s a theme that will run right through it.
The thing is, these companies have always operated like this. See what’s selling well, clone it as fast as possible, sell it for slightly less. That’s their business model.
The big difference between now and five years ago is that five years ago, they were ripping each other off. Nobody had to get sued, because next month something completely different would be popular.
Now, Apple are leading the market in something like 5 or 6 segments, with a single, consistent design language that evolves in annual increments. The copying isn’t new, but it’s much, much more obvious, and it’s targeting a single company.
Even if they understand the problem, design culture and expertise isn’t something you can magic out of nowhere, or simply throw money at. It takes years. Just look at the flailing attempts of Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon.
The one real exception to this is, ironically, Samsung, who used to have a pretty strong design department putting out distinctive, innovative hardware, but have somehow ended up with the most slavish clones of all.