<story><title>How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany-website-copy-machine#p1</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jedc</author><text>Yes, they&apos;re copycats.&lt;p&gt;But those of us who live in Europe sometimes get absolutely &lt;i&gt;infuriated&lt;/i&gt; by US-based startups who go for years ignoring potential non-US customers.  I&apos;m sure Fab.com would have eventually rolled out to Europe, but in the meantime I&apos;m happy that someone else built a product that solves the same problem.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes this is a real regulatory problem, like anything to do with banking/payments/etc.  But oftentimes it&apos;s just because businesses don&apos;t seem to like taking on the extra work/complexity of thinking internationally.&lt;p&gt;So while I don&apos;t like their pure copycat methods (down to page layouts), I think they&apos;re serving a valuable purpose in the marketplace.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany-website-copy-machine#p1</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>I think there is a lot to learn from companies that operate in multiple languages- I used to work for one myself (until they, too, got a little copy-happy). Internationalisation is a huge market, and almost all US startups ignore it entirely. We had our original sites running in French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Hungarian, Russian... you name it. We weren&apos;t number one in any country- we were usually number 2 or 3. But none of our competitors operated outside their home country, so we managed to be very successful by occupying a lesser spot in multiple countries. Don&apos;t get me wrong, there is a large overhead in doing this- but there&apos;s plenty of opportunity, too.</text></comment>