da Vinci, Monteverdi and Shakespeare were all great creators in their respected fields of art, music and literature. Though it could be argued as to the quality of each, it would be tough to dispute that none are creative. All originated great pieces that have been copied time and time again throughout history.
We would be stuck in the Renaissance had we not evolved the works of these great inventors and creators. We may not have evolved much had others not taken the works of these great people and developed new works from them. More than likely art, literature and music wouldn’t be where it is today without these greats.
Evolution of an idea or creative notion is one thing. Outright stealing someone’s creative idea and relabeling it with their own name remains plagiarism. We can probably all agree that taking someone’s idea and labeling it with a different name would be pretty easy to spot – especially in today’s day and age.
Unfortunately the creative thoughts of our time are being taken and reissued with new names. It’s fairly easy to do with technology because of the many different ways and methods of rewriting computer code, wiring circuits and repackaging ideas. But, it’s not terribly difficult to spot the original.
One case in point is Microsoft’s Bing product which was just caught using Google’s infamously fantastic (I’m not that biased) search engine to generate search results. It would be difficult to reinvent the years of evolutionary change that Google engineers have developed. Rather than create their own, Microsoft decided to just steal.
As it turns out, Google suspected Microsoft of copying its code so they laid a trap. Microsoft wasn’t actually copying the code, they were actually copying the results of Google searches and inputting them directly into their own website search results. Obviously this is wrong.
China has been copying our ideas for years and re-inventing them under their own brands and names. Though there haven’t been many US brands of electronics for years there are some you may not have heard of. SmallStone was a brand of electric guitar effects pedals. Used to distort the output of an electronic instrument, SmallStone manufactured premium equipment.
A Chinese company copied the SmallStone product piece by piece and drove the small company out of business. Under close inspection the two products look and function identically, producing the exact same output. However, the Chinese product costs approximately a quarter of the price of its US creator.
I could go on and on about products that have been copied, rebranded and repackaged either to compete against the original or to simply take credit. If products were actually redeveloped and reinvented into new versions that would be a justifiably better scenario and technology would evolve naturally.
Too bad we’ve reached a point where new technological ideas are simply not sprouting at the rate they should be. We’ve been using the same DVD technology for years. CD players still have start, stop, skip and fast forward functions. Even though computers today are faster than a year ago, they still have the same basic processors, power supplies and hard drives.
My point to all this is to take a look at new ideas coming into the market and really think about the differences between what was and what is. I can guarantee that with most things you really won’t notice a significant difference; and may not notice any distinction at all. Before you jump to use a new piece of technology that boasts about being better, as yourself “is it really better?”
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can text him at (978) 413-2840 or call him directly at (978) 919-8059.)