And that resemblance brought some heated discussion.
A little bit of disclaimer. A person can never seperate himself from his cultural roots and the social influence and sooner or later, I'll be attacked for my Chinese point of view so I say at the beginning that I am Chinese; I grew up in Beijing. I'm getting my college education in the US right now.
The company's CEO, however, looks to me not mainland Chinese. The company Meizu is based in Zhu Hai, a southmost booming Chinese technology city. But judging from the company's CEO's name Jack Wong, he either isn't really largely influenced by mainland China education or is from Hong Kong because official Chinese pinyin would translate his name into Jack Wang. (Wong is the Cantonese counterpart of Wang in Mandarin.) So no matter what his stand point is, mine is independent even from cultural background point of view.
First of all, regarding the GUI similarities, it all depends on how Apple's design is patented. If by law, it's illegal, then it is wrong and Jack Wong has made a really wrong choice. Popularity of iPhone asserts the design's appeal but it's unlikely perfect. Proper changes would not only lawly differ the GUI but also make the phone more attractive. Of course, that's all just words because the effect of any of the changes, the fine line between being a smart upgrade and a non-genuine, stupid copy is really hard to judge. These are crucial for him to decide and also his supporters.
I do support his idea and here I explain why.
Personally, I see fundamental differences between the devices. M8 uses Windows CE and iPhone uses OS X. You can make KDE look like Windows GUI or vice versa. But that only means the GUIs are versatile and they can be made the same or look similar. So Windows CE has the potential to like OS X and he only used it. (Whether legally or not, again, even law is subjective in a way, I don't want to go any deeper into that.)
However, I think his idea of second-generation development style is very suitable for new born IT companies in developing countries like Meizu. These companies apparently do not have the capital to pull off a R&D cycle on its own so it has to use its own advantages. What are its advantages? Flexibility and cheap labor.
Marginal benefit diminishes. So to some extent, it'll cost big companies too much to test every possibility and make everything perfect. It's like hiring people to pick up trash on the street. If your engineers (trash pickers) are all paid high, you better only hire them enough long to pick up enough trash so that the street is not blocked. If you hire college students, you can hire them longer to pick up more so the streets are kind of clean. And if you hire boys running on the street, you can hire them really long to get the streets really clean.
The analogy is meant to show that up to a certain point, developing cost including human cost and time cost can be really high for large companies so they stop at a certain point on the way to "perfection" and little companies can pick it up there because they can still make a few "relatively crucial" detail changes and by proper imitation (within lawful territory) make a new product. Both parties won't lose because there's really no promise how well the little companies will do when they change the designs. They may affect stability or they may simply screw up in any of the one million possible ways. So the targeted higher end market is still the big company's and the small company get a share of the low-end market. Besides, if the small company can make as good a product with legal imitations at a much cheaper price, then the big company simply loses at cost management. There are probably more advantages for small companies but I guess they teach these in MBA courses and I don't have permission to talk about that.
Furthermore, I think J. Wong's business idea is quite smart at that at a reasonable risk, he is already getting more attention, creating a larger consumer base by this act. The device could turn out very different from iPhone in various ways, but the slight hint of resemblance could really help.
To make the idea work out even better, I here offer my advice for him:
Improvement is crucial. If it's only as good as iPhone or not even as good (on average), he should only expect criticism. The device will sell but it's definitely bad for the company's future. Even if he doesn't get into any law trouble, the company will be seen as a stupid copying factory. Larger companies do imitate in certain ways like Moto and Nokia both have "Blackberry Clones" but it is their own inventions that make them the way they are. If we start a company immitating all Apple's products, call it ELPPA, the company will probably only grow 1/1000 size of Apple not to mention that there are a lot of products that you can't just immitate. So resemblance being the eye-catcher, improvement is the soul of the product (Improvements sounds like the phone somehow is based on iPhone. The phone of course doesn't necessarily base on iPhone but it should certainly learn from user feedbacks of iPhone.) .
At the end of the day, if you make a better phone, it will sell, in China, in the US, in Europe and people will love it because people simply want a good cell phone and that's what it is. Which company invented car? Mercedes I think. But people buy Toyota, BMW, GM, Ford, because their cars are just simply good. And success of M8 may push Apple to issue an iPhone II because otherwise no one buys an iPhone. (Or less probably, they might issue one anyway.) And that'll put Meizu in competition with Apple which is great for Meizu, the consumer (now, Apple is almost running a monopoly in touch screen smart phones).
From the consumer point of view, M8 could be better because it's much less expensive. It has good quality. I actually look forward to a more lasting battery than iPhone's. In China, we've got those Chinese made cell phone batteries for big brands like Samsung or Nokia that sell at 30% the price of brand battery yet last longer. My father has had Fei Mao Tui batteries for his Samsung cell phones and he says the Chinese batteries actually last much longer. So I hope M8 take advantage of that. (How is that possible? Again, probably lower cost. How low can cost go down to?) Flexible to be used with any carrier and you can just stick a local SIM card from anywhere you go and use it which saves you a lot of phone bills because you won't be roaming. (My professor received a $1800 bill after he attended a meeting in Israel.) And you know what, according to the specs, you have two SIM slots, the way Chinese like it. A lot of Chinese people like dual SIM slots because then they can have a phone number just for business or work and another one for family and friends. It won't be bounded with iTunes and will probably offer good sync support to any Windows based computer (Windows for sure and Mac and Linux probably?) I won't get too deep into its features, we'll just have to wait and see some reviews after it comes out.
I meant to offer more precise suggestions but unfortunately I don't own an iPhone so I don't know the detailed cons of iPhone and of course I don't think M8 is around for me to make suggestions either.
What I do know is however, some people complain about the keyboards and I've written something on keyboard suggestions for Blackberry 9000 (rumored touch screen) to beat iPhone but those are kind of long shots.
In the end, I hope the company can grow healthily and maybe utilize the free Android platform in the future and develop a phone with good hardware configuration as this one and still at a low price utilizing its own advantages I've mentioned above.
Update:Here's the most comprehensive and detailed information about M8 (Mini one) I've found.
1 comment:
Nice article. In China, cloning popular stuff wasn't uncommon. They practically cloned everything that's popular.
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