Large tech companies have the resources to clone any single piece of software engineering or hardware engineering. The marginal cost of developing a new "feature" of their existing "product" is so small in the grand scheme of things. As long as you have software engineers, money, and an idea, you can make something like sidecar real; this company needed to create all three from scratch, Apple has oodles of the first two and can easily steal ideas for the third. With that being said, if the only definition of a product is something that Apple can't replicate, then I'm afraid we are damn near out of products.

(Again, this applies to every large tech company, not just apple)

Large tech companies can replicate anything but it doesn't make sense for them to clone products sold in a small market.

Legal operations software, for example, is about a 1 billion market[0].

Your startup can compete in this space but it's too small to be worth pursing for Microsoft.

[0] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/07/05/187891...

Companies can clone features not products.

And they will only do so in a market that is core to them.

Companies do clone products though - see Amazon Basics.

You can make something that the big co doesn't want to make, like something user customizable.

Which is effectively what OP says in the blogpost: they will go on by offering more advanced features in the product that was more customizable.

You're using this trope entirely out of context.

There are only handful of companies (Google and FB come to mind) that make products for Apple's platform that Apple can't easily replicate itself.

That seems unnecessarily cheeky. If you can make money on it, its a product, if someone builds it in to their product line, perhaps they did it better (though not always).

You can make money off many things that aren’t products. Pedantically we might be right that anything revenue is product, but I think it’s the difference between a real product and an add on that people only buy because hey are buying something else.

The advice is useful because if I’m building a feature I will either be purchased by a product or eventually be added into a product.

I can see what you are saying. Perhaps a third option of advice is being suggested here which is diversify your feature to make it better than a built in solution or diversify your business to make it resilient to these types of loss.

I think that’s a good strategy. As long as I’ve paid attention (85+) there have been “feature” companies selling addons and stuff on top of windows, Mac, Oracle, etc.

I think the risk is thinking you are a product company when actually a feature company and then not diversifying.

"Easily" in this case is a trillion dollar company throwing multiples of what you could without really blinking.

Spending $10M worth of resources on a project within Apple is not even notable, meanwhile that's a healthy series A for a startup.

If what you have is a business that pays the teams salaries, then what you built is by definition a product, not a feature.

Maybe the government should get in the way then.