When you're coming up with a new idea, you often have to go down a bunch of dead-end alleys and you're not even sure if what you're attempting is possible. When you're reimplementing an existing product you know exactly the right avenue to go down, and you know for sure it's possible.
And Apple has over a hundred billion dollars in cash and eighty thousand employees. They could certainly clone this software if they wanted to.
The reason to acquire is to signal to other people that doing innovative things on apple platforms can make you a millionaire, instead of signalling the same thing is a sucker's game as apple will steal your ideas if they're any good.
"you often have to go down a bunch of dead-end alleys and you're not even sure if what you're attempting is possible."
This is my biggest worry with my product. I literally spent two years going down dead-end alleys to refine my Information Flow Control System because there was nobody that I could copy from. We often hear "Ideas are worthless. It's the execution that matters." which is true but knowing what does and doesn't work is as important in my opinion.
Apple now knows you can capture video very efficiently with JPEG. People now know, if you want to build a powerful social media product, you'll have to use real names and so forth.
I can't back this up with citations as I don't remember where I read this from, but it basically said innovators are usually not the ones that benefits from their innovations. It's usually those that tweaks the innovations that benefit the most.
I guess the message is, if you do have something innovative, you should probably patent it. You might not be able to protect yourself from larger companies, but you'll certainly improve your chances of being acquired.
You do realize the enormous technical accomplishment that Snappycam's reworking of the jpg algorithm, and it's implementation on the iPhone processor was, right?
To call it a "decent iPhone app" somewhat puts down the 12 or so months of hard core research and implementation that jpap put into it.
And Apple has over a hundred billion dollars in cash and eighty thousand employees. They could certainly clone this software if they wanted to.
The reason to acquire is to signal to other people that doing innovative things on apple platforms can make you a millionaire, instead of signalling the same thing is a sucker's game as apple will steal your ideas if they're any good.