FIGURE A

Can you find 10 distinctions? Hardly!

To be honest, I must say that sometimes clones are really good and professionally designed. They can take market share away from the original products. Many unfair developers, sometimes big and well-known, use this doubtful strategy. I, personally, consider this a kind of piracy. Cloning is a real pain for many developers who wish to protect their software ideas from copying.

Especially, this is vital for games. The only way for the original developer to win the fight is to release regular updates with new features to make the clones outdated. I don't mention the actual titles to not promote the cloning tactics, I'm sure you meet them everyday.

Improve it
This case is similar to the previous one. The programmers also copy existing ideas, but they slightly or substantially modify it aiming to improve its functionality, to add new features, or to simplify the user interface.

Often they choose the program that they regularly use themselves and which they feel could be improved. Sometimes, such idea alternations beat the prototype and become even more popular products.

Unlike cloning, the improvement tactic has positive effect. It gives new power to good ideas. This is the main engine of software industry. Really new ideas are rare but the desire to make something better is natural. The most successful programs appear when developer unites several of the most successful ideas.

A good example of and improved idea is SnapperMail (at http://snappermail.com) by Snapperfish. The idea of sending email from your Palm is natural and the traditional Palm Mail does this well. Figure B shows both, and you can see the improvements.

FIGURE B

SnapperMail shows the art of idea improvement! Click picture for a larger image.

In fact, the guys from SnapperMail team just added an ability to attach files to the messages and their program became a real killer app. So, they took the obvious idea, enhanced it with another one and ... Voila! It's like magic, isn't it?

Focus it
The opposite approach can be also fruitful. Sometimes, it's worthwhile to get an idea and to make it more focused and clear. There are many applications that became overgrown with lots of features. Users continually ask developers to add new functions and extensions to a program.

Soon, such a program will become a clumsy monster that hides the main idea under the pile of modules, extensions, add-ons, and rarely used functions. Here is a lucky chance for a developer who extracts that idea and builds a new small, agile, and focused product. Usually, such programs are strict and they solve the exact problem, but users surprisingly love this. Often they do not need a highly customizable application to perform a tedious operation and they prefer simplicity to versatility.

For example, there is a number of time management programs for Palm OS with tons of features and functions. They are popular among business people who have to mange complex schedule on their PDA. But most people don't need such monstrous systems. That's why they prefer simple yet powerful programs, such as BugMe! by Electric Pocket Ltd (at http://www.electricpocket.com/bugme-palm), shown in Figure C. It allows creating sticky alarms just in seconds. Nothing superfluous. Very focused and very useful!