Recent episodes have shown this copycat behavior to be quite common and life-threatening to startups. The copying comes in various flavors. Sometimes tech giants simply copy innovative features. When Snapchat was doing well with stories that disappeared after 24 hours, for example, Facebook retaliated by introducing the same feature to its products, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Subsequently, Snapchat’s usership stalled. It has had trouble regaining momentum, and its stock price went down dramatically.

In more egregious cases, whole “form factors” (in Silicon Valley jargon) have been copied. After years of growing its user base at nearly 5% per month (!) Slack’s adoption rate has slackened and started to show signs of decline. The pivotal event? The introduction of Microsoft’s knockoff product, Teams. Microsoft did what it does best: waited to see signs of success (four years, in this case) then copied the offering and later integrated it into its other products.

Read the full article on Harvard Business Review.

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