Thank you. THANK YOU! Something that has always pissed me off is when business leaders say things along the lines of "We're not about making money. That may be a side effect of what we do. But our real mission is to help people do XYZ." Then they see other companies trying to do XYZ and try to put them out of business.<p>We're always taught that competition brings out the best, and sometimes that's true. Sometimes you get parties in the same space improving in ways to one-up each other and put out a superior product. But sometimes you get Susan G. Komen trying to trademark the pink ribbon.
And yet, if you're an apple farmer, you don't <i>want</i> to see another apple stall at the farmers market - whether or not you see them as competitors or "co-creators" of apples. You really want to be the only guy with apples, for a bunch of fairly practical reasons. You get a strong pricing position, but also your customers (mental) lives are arguably better because they no longer have the burden of choice - at least, if they are certain they want an apple, and not an orange.<p>It may be morally correct for the apple seller to embrace the new apple seller, and call him a "co-creator". But how will these good feelings will last when his competitor discovers a way to get much higher yields of apples, and drives the price down? Or less ethically (but certainly permitted) would be for a well-healed seller to price dump a little, and try to get the competition out of the market.<p>The only thing that allows two competitors to happily co-exist is scarcity. If there is huge demand that cannot be satisfied, by both producers together, then these maneuvers just aren't possible, because people will continue to buy from both sellers at any price. This is a luxurious place to be in business. Perhaps that is where we are in the software field, in 2014: a huge demand for new software, with so few people able to actually make the stuff, makes us one big happy family. But when the demand decreases, or the supply of software-makers increases, it will be difficult to maintain this attitude of cooperation.
Also known as an abundance mentality. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People#Abundance_mentality" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effe...</a>
Stupid site is totally broken with NoScript even though all that matters in it is plain text.<p>Anyway, there's something to do this sentiment, but people often are actually more productive when collaborating than when reinventing the wheel over and over. And splitting up attention between a bunch of projects isn't healthy in and of itself. It's just that it's also true that competition has many benefits. But it's complicated.
Its ok to think this way - if you're not about the money. The guy who IS about the money will eat your lunch. Spread rumors about your quality. Suggest you're not a professional product. Snag your domain name right before you rename yourself. Cut you in a hundred ways.<p>Nice to think everybody will play nice, and in some imaginary world that might happen. But here, its important to keep looking out for number one.
The term "co-creation" was being used in marketing space a few years ago as a synonym for collaborative user generated content. It disappeared for a while and here it is again being used in a "hey, look at me" self marketing blog post as a synonym for competitive collaboration. I'd say the meaning hasn't diverged at all.
When my product manager needs to make a product decision, rather than thinking about it and coming up with a single creative idea, he rather goes directly to competitors' sites. Every time, without fail. I look at our product roadmap and it looks like a diff of our site vs competitor site. It drives me crazy. After reading this blog entry though, I understand. It truly is the nature of business.
Another issue is that a competitor validates your concept.<p>It's seen time and time again that having multiple drug categories in a concept (say SSRI, proton pump inhibitor, etc.) validates the concept and encourages the sale of those drugs.
How do they do that loading thing at the top with the green bar?<p>I've seen similar with red on Youtube, but I just assumed it was a google perk for running on google chrome.
From the comments by author:<p>> The final outcome might also be better if we do it ourselves rather than give everything away.<p>Yeah, that pretty much allows for negating everything above.
Yes, yes, I agree fully.<p>The problem is that the philistines can't motivate themselves to do <i>anything</i> without a competitive frame. They just fall into pointless favor-trading and rent-seeking. They see creation for its own sake as self-indulgent, manic, pointless, or (gasp!) <i>effeminate</i>. The result is that motivations like "build cool shit" or "help people" are cast as reckless and irresponsible, vision goes away, and reliable mediocrity becomes the new game of the day. With competing to excel rendered impossible, people compete instead to suffer in pointless social competitions that have a flavor of reality TV.<p>There's this negative stereotype that engineers "don't want to concern themselves with the business", and that they'd rather shut themselves away in an ivory tower and build "cool" stuff that no one cares about. That's not true at all! However, they <i>refuse</i> (often passively, because to be active in it leads to professional adversity) to subordinate themselves to the business, especially when the business seems to have no vision, no real purpose for existing, and a cost-cutting mentality that squashes excellence.<p>Often, the only way to get the MBA-culture philistines to do the right thing (and let the creative geniuses shine) is to create a sense of competition and existential crisis. "We have to crush Facebook before they crush us. We need this autonomy for our best people." Meanwhile, Facebook doesn't give a damn about "crushing" anyone. The problem is that the people who are the <i>best</i> at creating a sense of existential crisis are the ones who excel at artificial scarcity and its theater-- psychopaths. The long-term consequences of this competitive mentality (often the only alternative to executive, rent-seeking complacency) are horrible.<p>I'd <i>love</i> to see the excellence mentality become more common. You're starting to see it in open allocation cultures like Valve. We need a million times more of that because, you're right, OP, we're <i>not</i> in competition. We're just trying to fucking live well. No one has to lose.