Since I seemed to get mentioned quite frequently in the comment thread:
I have talked quite openly for about six years on both how much money I'm making and with very specific information on exactly why the business works. If there is a web app begging to be cloned, it is BCC, since you could make a decent 1.0 as a CS102 final lab project. BCC (and AR, incidentally) have been cloned multiple times, right down to button copy (not really a competitive threat) and the SEO strategy. (P.S. The SEO strategy is not "get popular with geeks, make out like a bandit", though being quote-unquote Internet famous certainly has never hurt me. It just doesn't make BCC scads of money. What makes BCC scads of money is 970 niche bingo activities all designed to rank #1 for a narrowly targeted search term.)
A lot of people I respect in the space enormously are similarly open about their business, similarly have clones up the wazoo, and similarly don't really mind. Fog Creek, 37signals, and Balsamiq suggest themselves fairly readily but there's probably another dozen I could think of given a few minutes.
There's also kind of a fixed-pie thing going on here, where Jacques seems to be saying the world has (making this concrete for an example) 5,000 teachers a year who want bingo cards to split up among all the bingo software and they're going to choose based on price. First, if you learn one thing about software pricing, learn that software is not sold on price. Second, there are all sorts of ways in which that sharing information helps to improve the size of the pie. This is true in both hippy-dippy "everyone gets better!" ways and in you-can-deposit-the-larger-pie-in-your-bank account ways. (Someone below mentions BCC and related Internet participation eventually opened quite a few doors in my consulting career. This is very accurate and consulting is rather substantially more lucrative than BCC is, though I probably won't continue doing lots of it forever.)
Also, jealously guarding the pennies you have right now is almost certainly not the thing you can most effectively be doing to have dollars tomorrow.
I have talked quite openly for about six years on both how much money I'm making and with very specific information on exactly why the business works. If there is a web app begging to be cloned, it is BCC, since you could make a decent 1.0 as a CS102 final lab project. BCC (and AR, incidentally) have been cloned multiple times, right down to button copy (not really a competitive threat) and the SEO strategy. (P.S. The SEO strategy is not "get popular with geeks, make out like a bandit", though being quote-unquote Internet famous certainly has never hurt me. It just doesn't make BCC scads of money. What makes BCC scads of money is 970 niche bingo activities all designed to rank #1 for a narrowly targeted search term.)
A lot of people I respect in the space enormously are similarly open about their business, similarly have clones up the wazoo, and similarly don't really mind. Fog Creek, 37signals, and Balsamiq suggest themselves fairly readily but there's probably another dozen I could think of given a few minutes.
There's also kind of a fixed-pie thing going on here, where Jacques seems to be saying the world has (making this concrete for an example) 5,000 teachers a year who want bingo cards to split up among all the bingo software and they're going to choose based on price. First, if you learn one thing about software pricing, learn that software is not sold on price. Second, there are all sorts of ways in which that sharing information helps to improve the size of the pie. This is true in both hippy-dippy "everyone gets better!" ways and in you-can-deposit-the-larger-pie-in-your-bank account ways. (Someone below mentions BCC and related Internet participation eventually opened quite a few doors in my consulting career. This is very accurate and consulting is rather substantially more lucrative than BCC is, though I probably won't continue doing lots of it forever.)
Also, jealously guarding the pennies you have right now is almost certainly not the thing you can most effectively be doing to have dollars tomorrow.