Why We Want Tech Copycats to Fail

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One of the things I obsess about is whether our current state of technology is immutable.

Are Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and other tech giants invincible? Will they forever command a big chunk of our attention and money, shape how economies and labor markets operate and influence what people believe? Or is there room for others?

One way to explore these questions is to look at tech copycats. When we do, I see a glimmer of hope.

This tale starts with TikTok. It’s a rare example of an internet property that became huge and wasn’t owned by one of America’s tech stars. It’s owned by … a very large Chinese internet conglomerate called ByteDance. But that still counts as different.

There are plenty of concerns about TikTok, including what it’s doing with people’s personal information.

But TikTok’s popularity shows that it’s still possible for a fresh-faced internet star to break through.

With any success there are inevitably rip-offs. The technology news outlet The Information recently wrote about one of China’s internet superpowers, Tencent, trying and mostly failing to copy Douyin, ByteDance’s version of TikTok in China.

The efforts included Tencent’s widely used WeChat app requiring people to use the company’s Douyin copycat if they wanted to send virtual cash envelopes, a common practice around Lunar New Year. It’s not clear if WeChat’s arm-twisting worked.

Both YouTube and Instagram (owned by Facebook) have introduced their own TikTok-like apps. My colleagues wrote last year about how much they disliked the Instagram version, Reels. It’s hard to tell how Reels is doing, but it certainly hasn’t taken over the internet yet.

But having a second-class product — maybe even a bad one — doesn’t spell doom. A powerful company can make a product a hit through sheer force of will, a willingness to spend money like crazy and repeated exposure to millions of people.

That’s what Slack, the workplace chat app, said Microsoft was trying to do with its Slack-like software. And that’s what Facebook did with its video-and-photo montage “stories” feature, which was copied from Snapchat.

Sometimes copycats in technology succeed big — just look at Microsoft’s Windows, the iPhone or Facebook’s social network. (Also, sometimes the rip-offs are much better than the original.)

But it doesn’t always work. Tencent’s WeChat is an inescapable force on the Chinese internet, but its popularity hasn’t translated into success for the company’s Douyin clone. For now.

We’ve seen before that big leaps forward in technology can bring down industry titans, like the cellphone pioneer Nokia. But boy, it sure feels like the tech giants today are so entrenched, so good at what they do — and, perhaps, skilled at tilting the game to their advantage — that they simply can’t be beaten.

It would be better for all of us if Big Tech wasn’t an absolute and invulnerable force. I’ll see the wobbles of TikTok’s clones as a sign that it’s still possible for Big Tech to fail.

Facebook can’t admit how Facebook works

Facebook and its WhatsApp chat app got unwanted attention when they rolled out a confusing update to a privacy policy. After thinking it over for a few weeks, the companies are still getting it wrong.

Quick catch up: There was a mini global freakout last month when WhatsApp started notifying people about what appeared to be new steps that forced WhatsApp users to hand over their personal data to Facebook, which owns the app.

WhatsApp didn’t actually change very much, but its communications were awful. And it was a moment for people to consider something they perhaps had not before: Facebook already collects a lot of information from what people do on WhatsApp.

In response to the drama, Facebook and WhatsApp said they would pause and think over people’s criticisms. On Thursday, WhatsApp responded. It was better but still not quite right.

WhatsApp keeps saying what it doesn’t do with people’s personal information — that messages are scrambled so that no one can peer at the contents, and that WhatsApp doesn’t share your phone number with businesses. But WhatsApp still isn’t saying what it does do with people’s personal information.

The plain talk is that Facebook gathers information when people use non-Facebook apps on their phones. The company harvests people’s physical location even when they’re not using Facebook. It keeps track of people you unfriended, all of the websites you visit and your contacts. Many of us understand this, even if we don’t want to acknowledge all of the gory details.

Most of Facebook’s data harvesting applies to WhatsApp, too, although Facebook says that WhatsApp contacts aren’t shared with Facebook.

So why can’t WhatsApp just say all of this?

Here is the fundamental problem, I think: People at Facebook are unwilling to be honest about how Facebook works.