phunk

There are more malicious people I would send you after first. This exact scenario happens constantly in this industry. Only a few products that I have designed were never copied either in concept or entirety.

Lots of people need to feel special in everything they do, and they suffer some condition where they simply cannot run *any* product off the shelf. They have to have their twist on it to "make it better" for them; so they come up with excuses and reasons. Changes that will never actually impact anything other than reinforce their pride. This type of person usually has no idea how they negatively impact genuine product developers, they are oblivious to anything outside of their own world. And hey I just described myself half the time, so how mad can I get.

Last year... customer buys my S2000 fuel pump. It arrives to him, he asks me if I will custom make him another one with a few really minor changes. I declined, because of course that would be silly to put a bunch of time into a 1-off item with no purpose. Nothing he wanted to change would make an actual improvement to the product, it was just small changes to make him feel special. So what does he do? Naturally he copies 99% of the design and sends it to another company to produce a batch of them, and now there are 2 nearly identical units on the market, watering down the value of the R&D and product, all because he needed to feel special. <shrug> what are you gonna do? Keep chugging forward.

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