Xiaomi VP Hugo Barra Defends Against Copycat Accusations in New Interview

[thekeyring]

It would be nice if companies could be successful without being 'Apple-like'.

Imagine if Apple was beaten into oblivion... The who would invent stuff and present it in a coherent way?

Just take a look at a little thing: websites. Would Xiaomi's website be as clean and minimal if Apple hadn't first made their website clean and minimal?

 

[mazz0]

Watch the video, Steve Jobs clearly says:

Video not working in the office. I remember the "boy have we patented it" line. I'm not going to defend Steve Jobs, you don't get to be successful founder and CEO of a huge company without being a ruthless, dishonest ****er, but was that not maybe a half-truth? They may not have invented the sensor technology, but did they invent some of the software features (pinch to zoom, etc), which are the things they patented?

 

[mazz0]

Wow, that company is a joke. Even their website behaves like apple.com

Absolutely absurd!

It would be nice if companies could be successful without being 'Apple-like'.

Imagine if Apple was beaten into oblivion... The who would invent stuff and present it in a coherent way?

Just take a look at a little thing: websites. Would Xiaomi's website be as clean and minimal if Apple hadn't first made their website clean and minimal?

OK, I've had a look at their website, I think it's a bit of a stretch to call that an Apple rip off. Apple didn't invent minimalism.

 

[Keirasplace]

Um, no. I honestly think their design looks better from the front, not so much the back. I don't see anything about that phone that is similar to any Apple phone. Except maybe the fact that they are both rectangular.

I find it interesting that no one cared how similar wall phones from different companies looked before the whole cell phone craze.

Really, man, why even post here.... You're on ignore. Bye.

 

['Dorian]

Why don't we go out and take some colored sugar water, put it in a red aluminum can with a white wavy line running through it and sell it as Koka Kola? Does Coca Cola really think they own the rights to colored sugar water and red aluminum cans?

Not sure if you're joking, but no they don't. There's hundreds of "copied" versions on the market in look alike cans. It's their recipie that makes it different which is known as a Trade Secret. If you were serious, that was a horrible analogy because it would prove the opposite of what you most likely thought.

If you somehow got their recipe you have every right to make it exactly the same and call it anything other that Coka Cola

 

[Shirasaki]

Before checking other posts, I would say one thing to EVERY single Chinese company seeking for expanding overseas markets:

Before trying to sell something new to the world, first, sit down, and strengthen your basics. Borrowing from others is not a shame, since everyone would do that to learn new things. BUT, claiming something created by others is the original is simply not fair.

Xiaomi, Tencent, Baidu, the world outside China mainland is quite different from what it is in China mainland. I bet many Chinese cotizens would feel proud when their own product could be a competitive alternative in the world.

 

[Chytin]

Nice try Hugo. I am glad most people are not as stupid or blind as you probably think. We decide ourselves whether a product is copied or not, and your company definitely does. There are just too many evidence.

You definitely should release a well designed copy machine but then again, Apple doesn't make one.

 

[caincha]

Well, things are how they are because Apple made it like that with the first iPhone, so...

 

[Shirasaki]

The solution is simple. If Apple's products are better, buy Apple. If one day Xiaomi's products make more sense, buy Xiaomi. This is like the writing systems. Basically, today's human writing systems are all derived from either Phoenician alphabets or Chinese characters. The rest are all copycats. This is how human civilization evolves.

And seems that Japanese is a branch of Chinese character system.

 

[H2SO4]

It would be nice if companies could be successful without being 'Apple-like'.

Imagine if Apple was beaten into oblivion... The who would invent stuff and present it in a coherent way?

Just take a look at a little thing: websites. Would Xiaomi's website be as clean and minimal if Apple hadn't first made their website clean and minimal?

Quite possibly yes. Why do you think that everybody has copied Apple?
I like minimalist things, I have done long before I even heard of Apple. What has happened here is that the press have given all of their attention to Apple so we all think it is they that are being copied at every turn.

Whilst Apple are known for a particular type of design please don’t think that it is suddenly impossible for any other designer anywhere to come up with something similar with Apple. In this specific case things may be different.

 

[diazj3]

Apple does NOT have any right to dictate how the industry designs their phones. Every Apple fan needs to watch this:

In plain sight you see that Steve Jobs lied about Apple inventing multitouch. They did NOT. Nor did they invent rounded corners, a home button, a wedge shaped laptop or anything aesthetic.

Thanks for the video.

It's no secret Jobs was a great salesman, a marketing visionary... and a true douchebag.

 

[dannys1]

Semantics. Even if I give you the benefit, his claims we're incredibly misleading which basically had, and still has, everyone fooled about what apple actually has invented. Did they invent it? No.

Has Apple actually invented anything?

To answer that question, watch this video:

No, but they showed the world the best way to use it and now everyone else uses the same way. Implementation is as important as inventing the raw ingredients. Its like having a good story without a great movie director, or an excellent band without a brilliant record producer - raw brilliance excels at nothing. Apple bought the company who made multi-touch and didn't really know how to implement it. Xerox invented the GUI and the mouse, and Steve saw it figured out how to make it better with the Mac dev and released it to the world properly. Now every computer uses a mouse and a GUI, ever smartphone uses multi-touch. They also didn't invent Gorilla Glass but it was made in the 60's and no one found a use for it, Apple brought it to life for the iPhone and now every single smartphone made uses Gorilla glass too.

You're hugely downplaying the importance of Apple if you believe all that counts is who invents the original raw ingredient. And this is no fan-boy-ism, if anyone else revolutionised the home computer, music player, phone and tablet markets like Apple had, id commend them for it, regardless of where they pulled the technology from to do it, they've created the blue print for perfection in all these areas, unquestionably. If you can't credit that there's something wrong with you.

 

[Jon-Erich]

Technically, Jobs said that Apple had invented a technology that they call multi-touch. Different implementations exist and the principle behind multi-touch wasn’t new. It comprises lots of patents.

The term multitouch predates the patent filings from Fingerworks. That being said, Steve Jobs technically did not lie about Apple inventing multitouch. The technology in the iPhone was invented by Fingerworks, a company that Apple had purchased in 2005. It's Apple's technology, Apple's patents, Apple's employees. The only thing Steve Jobs failed to do was to go into the complicated history of how Apple acquired this technology which for the purposes of a live event would have been rather redundant.

One thing can be said. Apple could have invented their own version of multitouch without purchasing Fingerworks. According to both Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, they had the idea of having a multitouch screen. It's just that they tumbled upon Fingerworks who was already doing the same thing and buying them and their technology was less time consuming then inventing it themselves. The one part about all this where Apple deserves some credit is that for whatever reason, nobody really came up with the idea using this technology for a cell phone before Apple.

As for this company, I can understand their defenses about the phones. It is hard to make the design language of a smart phones too distinguishable but this company seems to be ripping off Apple in every way, shape and form. They've effectively marketed themselves as a Chinese counterfeit company. As for the remarks about discriminating against Chinese companies, aside from the fact that Chinese companies have had a long history of ripping off other companies to the point where there's practically a not-Disney Disney World theme park somewhere in China, nobody modern society could care less about where their phone comes from. People haven't cared about that in over 20 years. There's no longer and American television or a Japanese television. For a lot of the consumer devices we see on today's market, at least half a dozen countries of not more can claim that the said product is theirs.

 

[Zedsdead185]

Its not like Jony is completely innocent from copying though. People who think otherwise have never heard of Brauns most influential designer Dieter Rams...

 

[k1121j]

LOL do these anti apple posters get paid to spend there days on this website? would there time be better spent posting positive things on there favorite manufacture sites or don't they have something to love like i love my Apple products?.. so sad so very sad

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Xiaomi has both built products that are high-quality and innovative, yet they look like every other smartphone?

1. Build Quality (i.e "high-quality") is not necessarily related to innovation at all and certainly has nothing to do with how similar one product looks to another.

2. There are many other ways in which a smart phone or company can be innovative other than physical appearance.

It's really quite simple. Are you unable to understand these things?

 

[sickducker]

Its not like Jony is completely innocent from copying though. People who think otherwise have never heard of Brauns most influential designer Dieter Rams...

Dieter Rams considers this to be a homage and not a copy.

 

[lucan]

Apple does NOT have any right to dictate how the industry designs their phones. Every Apple fan needs to watch this:

In plain sight you see that Steve Jobs lied about Apple inventing multitouch. They did NOT. Nor did they invent rounded corners, a home button, a wedge shaped laptop or anything aesthetic.

Awesome TED talk. Thank you for sharing.

 

[Sasparilla]

Sure... The chamfered edge is the only thing...

Great set of examples. That is just an amazing level of pure copying....then to pretend that its not (especially this guy from Google)...that they just came up with all this...so cowardly.

 

[Winni]

"every smartphone looks like every other smartphone on the market"

Well of course they do after they all copied the iPhone.

I think this is just the good old Ive/Apple vs Rams/Braun discussion AGAIN. After all, Ive's own designs are not nearly as original as everybody makes them out to be -- he was significantly "inspired" by the old Rams designs. Maybe that's okay because he had the courtesy to communicate with Rams about it, but it's also very obvious that Apple's design are not on top of the food chain.

And the ting with the rounded corners still is ridiculous. Every street sign has them. And that is where Steve Jobs got that idea from. (Read "Revolution In The Valley" - the story about that is in there.) How on Earth was it possible to obtain a design patent for the rounded corners of PUBLIC street signs?

 

[Lindsford]

Wow, even their website for their phones looks like Apple's website design. No shame.

http://www.mi.com/en/minote/

 

[jm001]

Apple does NOT have any right to dictate how the industry designs their phones. Every Apple fan needs to watch this:

In plain sight you see that Steve Jobs lied about Apple inventing multitouch. They did NOT. Nor did they invent rounded corners, a home button, a wedge shaped laptop or anything aesthetic.

I think THIS guy copied his presentation. It sure seems like I've heard all this before.

 

[TallManNY]

I've got to admit the phones and tablets look great. And the price is nice as well, though that is only theoretical to me because their stuff isn't available in the U.S. But the build quality looks great, the specs look great, and the design (part ripped from Apple, part ripped from Samsung, part their own) seems really nice as well. I think they've got a viable business model taking design cues from Apple and Samsung and then just beating them on price point. Though probably some of their ability to provide a lower price is just by not paying licensing fees to patent holders.

 

[H2SO4]

LOL do these anti apple posters get paid to spend there days on this website? would there time be better spent posting positive things on there favorite manufacture sites or don't they have something to love like i love my Apple products?.. so sad so very sad

Why do fanboys assume that criticism of Apple is like insulting their god?
Listen, people criticising Apple often choose Apple as a brand exclusively but why should that mean that they can’t be called out if they lie and cheat? Come on man, get a grip and get those rose spectacles off.

 

[blackbirdz]

Copycat is bad in itself. But calling a company like Xiaomi an innovator or company with innovation is worse and disgusting. Just take a look at the presentation, Xiaomi CEO copied Jobs on One More Thing ... The jeans, the t-shirt. Of course, these are not trademarked, but Xiaomi is already a copycat from its core.