Comment by auganov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by auganov | Hacker News Reader

The main takeaway from Xiaomi's success is that being a ripoff is a valid business model. Not only valid, it can be better than trying to fake creativity. Xiaomi badly wants/wanted to be Apple. What they did with Android might look creative to you, but only if you look at it as an Android. Again, they want to be Apple. They want to have an iOS, modifying Android is the fastest way to get there.

To all the people saying Xiaomi is just taking inspiration - watch that: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODc0OTA0NzY4.html

I think we just have hard time stomaching the fact that people who blatantly plagiarize can win. We view it as evil and whenever someone does it and wins we try to explain how they really didn't.

It's okay, it's just globalization.

I think author explained the copycat claim rather clearly:

"It's a common reflex in the USA to call Xiaomi and similar companies copycats, on both a hardware and software level, and there's certainly a lot of design inspiration going on, but dismissing these phones as rip-offs is rather lazy. When you actually hold them and use them you would never mistake them for iPhones, any more than you'd mistake a $500 coat or bag for the $2,000 example that sometimes inspires the colour or trim. You can sometimes see where it came from, but it's not the same, nor is it trying to be. Rather, they deliver a similar approach to the user experience at a lower price in a way that's often been absent from Android so far (it's hard not to look at some of Nokia's beautiful Lumia devices and wonder what impact they might have had on Apple if they'd run Android)."

A 70 minute video in Chinese does not count as an argument. It is way too long to be expected to be viewed even if it was in English.

True, sorry, should have gave a brief description. It's Xiaomi CEO's latest keynote. It mimics Apple keynotes almost one to one. No, it's not just the same structure. Fonts, graphics, pacing, vids all look and feel the same. If I didn't know Xiaomi I might have assumed it's some kind of a parody of Apple.

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