[groth]

The founders of snapchat should be pretty happy right now -- they have an idea worth stealing. And to push your apple vs IBM analogy farther, it seems that they could potentially still win, by building a product that is far and away better for a certain segment of the market (i.e. as apple did).

To address the deeper philosophical claim -- are big companies morally obligated in some sense, to not encroach on ideas currently dominated by some startup, I think not. The whole crux of your argument is that there's some well ordering on the timestamp of ideas, and whoever is earlier in the well ordering has some moral claim to executing the idea. As far as I can see, there's no a priori reason why this should be so, and there are lots of utilitarian reasons why this ought not be so. Just because someone came up with the idea does not mean they are the best agent to execute the idea. I might be a brilliant military tactician, but I might lack the charisma or fortitude to lead an army. In the same way, I might be a brilliant social based startup, but my same product under the influence of the most complete social graph might be tons better.

I am not saying facebook poke is better than snapchat. I don't use either, but I do think competition is healthy. Now what would be problematic is if startups did -- as your article asserts -- stop having original ideas just because they were afraid big companies would clone them. In that case, the government should probably seriously consider penalizing companies like facebook for scooping up the idea, if not by making them disable the app completely, but by making them retroactively purchase or pay a large sum to snapchat. I don't have any data to discern whether a "chill" effect is happening, but I would guess an answer in the negative.