Buid Clones

I think of a great idea, something useful that makes me smile and gets excited. I search on the web and get discouraged to find that pretty good tools already exists in the market. Here I am going to talk about why it is okay to keep building even though there are solutions and how to differentiate.

Imagine if we adopted this mindset in real world. Someone has a grocery store in town. Should you open a new grocery store in the same block ?

Reasons why would someone come to you

• Product: Maybe you carry a different brand of milk and customers really like that. Maybe you carry bakery items that they don’t have. Both may have good(80%) overlap of items, but carry few differentiating products that draw the customers. Maybe you have wider selection of items than
• Shopping experience: Maybe you offer a better shopping experience. Someone who can take an order and get the items packed in a nice bag. Maybe shop has parking area to park your vehicle. Maybe they offer home delivery in the morning when the rush is low.
• Ease of payment: Maybe you let customer pay in cheques, online in addition to cash.
• Customer relationship: Maybe you treat your customers with a smile. :)
• Identity: Maybe customer identify with you due to same caste/religion/locality/profession.
• Trust: Maybe they trust your quality more than others.
• Target Audience: maybe you open your shop early at 7 am when everyone else is closed and people need stuffs for lunch.
• Others: Marketing, business or personal rivalry from your competitors, your political opinions etc.

Strange thing is all of these apply to a software business as well just like any other business. If there is no winner takes all, then why do we have disproportionate amount of monopolies in Tech/software industry ? Why don’t people make more clones of successful businesses ? Some people may say high cost of development, network effects etc. but there is more to the story

• No political pressure on anti-competitive practices such as collusion with competitors to set the price, acquisition of competitors,
• VCs funding the market leaders and leaving nothing for others.
• VC-driven industry. There is no alternate source of funding such as govt grants and funds, a company’s strategic funding arm, crowdfunding, bootstrapping. these days we are seeing an uptick in these alternate sources of funding.
• Monopoly and oligopoly is bad for everyone: Consumers, Government and ecosystem. Consumer have little choice on products. government can’t regulate because of non-existent alternatives. And innovation grinds to a halt. And that’s exactly what happened to tech ecosystem.

Let’s take operating systems for example. Server OS software is dominated by Linux which is maintained by Linux foundation with participation from companies all around the world(Huawei, Ericcson, Tencent, Samsung, Fujitsu, Epic Games) and from different industries. Maybe not Russia and North Korea. Still quite decentralized like United Nations. Although I am pretty sure decisions are being highjacked by powers in west. Moving on to personal operating systems, story gets much worse. windows(72 %), MacOS(15.42 %), Linux (4 %). Windows has maintained its market monopoly for so long that it’s hard to make the switch for most people. User experience is terrible on linux based OS, though that is changing with Elementary OS, linux mint. Very little GUI based applications such as office applications, adobe suite, communication apps. With cross-platform application development frameworks like Electron, Tauri more apps are made available on linux based distros. Little support for games to be played on Linux. That is also changing with Game engines(unreal, unity) adding support for linux. No awareness and training. Windows has been taught to students from very early age as a part of textbooks. No such training is available for linux based systems. Microsoft has been a dominant force ever since PC came out. It has abused its power since then to this day. In past it had bundled media players, office apps, browser with the OS installation. They also made it impossible for other software provider to have compatibility with their software (through usage of proprietary storage format and custom fonts). They also have a deal with OEMs which prohibits them from using any other OS. This had caused a stagnation in software development. Since windows 10, they have been collecting data and showing ads in the operating system itself(e.g. at lock screen, file explorer, task bar, search bar and so on) . Sometimes, there is no way to shut it down.

Similar thing happened with browsers. Internet explorer was the major browser in 2010s. During this time didn’t release any major version causing the whole web to stagnate. With google chrome, people started to notice what they were missing out on and started switching their browser. It took chrome more than 15 years to gain the dominant position in the browser market despite having much superior browser in every aspect. In 2021, two things happened. Microsoft Edge decided that it was too much effort(for a 3 Trillion $ company) playing catchup with google chrome and started to use chromium under the hood with its own layer on top. The same time, an engineer in Sweden battling his addiction decided to build a browser from scratch in C++ for fun. He called it Ladybird browser. He survived on donation from individual contributors, selling merchandise, and github sponsorship program. Fast forward in 2024, github co-founder invested 1 million USD in his open-source effort to write a browser from scratch. So, there is some hope in little guy standing up against mega corporations.

Same things played out in search: Google vs duckduckgo. No one was ready to fund duckduckgo in initial 3-5 years. He funded the operation himself with his savings and loans. Now it has about 200 employees. Social media: twitter vs mastodon. mastodon is particularly popular within open-source communities and in Europe. Eugen Rochko (creator of mastodon) heard the rumor in 2015 that Peter Thiel is buying twitter. He thought to himself that such a public utility of great importance should not be in total control of a US entity. He funded the project initially through crowdfunding. mastodon is NOT a clone. It is a federated social network, which is a better model for organizing social netwroks. I think his decision may also have been motivated by the economics of having to run these giant servers.