Silicon Valley may have found the copying undignified and the tactics unsavory. In many cases, it was. But it was precisely this widespread cloning—the onslaught of thousands of mimicking competitors—that forced companies to innovate. Survival in the internet coliseum required relentlessly iterating products, controlling costs, executing flawlessly, generating positive PR, raising money at exaggerated valuations, and seeking ways to build a robust business “moat” to keep the copycats out. Pure copycats never made for great companies, and they couldn’t survive inside this coliseum. But the
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