Jinn of Quality and Risk

Apple recently demonstrated a preview of their next evolution of MacOS X, Tiger. One new feature, Dashboard and dynamic gadgets (widgets?) programmable in JavaScript, is considered by many to be very similar to an existing shareware, Konfabulator, much to the annoyance of its creator. It's unfortunate for his business, but he should have seen it coming.

When one is developing products that are add-on technology for a platform (e.g. operating systems, such as Windows and MacOS), one needs to avoid product areas which will fairly obviously and soon be filled by the owner of the platform (namely Microsoft and Apple). Failure to avoid those areas is known as walking under the elephant's feet (whereby one may lose limbs and fortune). Developers of add-on technology are courting redundancy (or worse) by running between a moving elephant's legs.

Sometimes, the elephant likes the little running animals, they talk to each other, and the runners get to climb on the elephant. That's when a small company (or a few individual developers) may be acquired (respectively hired) by the platform owner.