Good or different?

At my day job I’m working to solve similar problems to those already being solved in some way by Google, Facebook, Quora and Twitter.

 In addition to developing respect for the work these guys have done, I find myself struggling with the similarities between my solutions and theirs. The question I ask myself is: how different should my solutions be? 

I’ve arrived at a similar solution, not by setting out to copy, but by setting out to tackle a similar problem without the luxury of doing it in a bubble where neither myself or more importantly, our users, aren’t familiar with what’s already out there. 

My feeling now is that for me that the desire to come up with something new is driven more by my own ego than any concern for the people using the thing. The only reasonable conclusion I can come to is to leave my ego at the door and acknowledge that innovating is hard, and that users want solutions before they want innovation. I hope that we’ll continue to get there by trying to understand our users, their problems and by refining our solutions. If we end up at a similar place to someone else, we need to challenge ourselves, but we won’t do something different just for the sake of it.

Simply put: “It’s better to be good than different”*

*If anyone can offer me the source of this quote/sentiment I’d appreciate it.