...but big companies that almost established the computer keyboard industry, what's their excuse?
Come to think of it, though, the Apple style of keyboard is so popular that I can't really blame bigger companies for tagging along. One might as well criticize the keyboard companies for all copying IBM and going with cylinder keytops instead of spherical keytops.
You know, I was just going to make a similar point myself. I think a lot of us focus the direction of blame or credit to Apple too much. If they were copied universally, how come cheap PCs weren't shipping with one button mice? Nobody copied Apple keyboards before the chiclet keyboards and even then, those keyboards were out for two years before they started popping up everywhere. That's not a terribly strong correlation of cause and effect. It shows influence, but it's a bit much to say it's a knee jerk effect.
For a number of years every video game controller differed quite noticeably from others with the only core resemblance being that you had a stick and at least one button. Now it seems like they're all shaped like Sony "handlebar" controllers with the exception of the Wii.
If you make something that works or that people seem to like, you're going to be copied because quite frankly I don't think anyone truly knows what really will sell or be practical in real world use. There are no conceptual failures.
For the most part, it's a big circular game of tag along.
Anyway, on a somewhat different note... remember when you had to be careful about which IBM PC clone you got because there were some brands out there that were almost always lemons? A handful of brands were trusted to be as good as the "real thing" or even better, but everything else carried a degree of risk.
