Linked by Kroc on Thu 30th Aug 2007 13:03 UTC
I hear often that when something new appears that "competition is good". The primary reasons competition is seen as good, are: it drives down prices; it gives consumers more choice; it pushes technology forward, quicker. Competition is not good because: competition is why consumers have to choose between HD-DVD and BluRay; competition is why DRM exists; and more. In this article, each of the supposed benefits of competition will be looked at in more detail.
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Member since:2007-02-11
> This is an anti-competitive action brought about by the presence of competition in the first place.
Very true. The problem with competition is that we are simply not in the eighties anymore (and even back then, we weren't in the seventies anymore :-P). The IT industry has converted from being a field ran by engineers to one ran by businessmen, who run it like they run fast food restaurants: once you get an edge over your competitors, you need to keep it and kill them off. The clients are only the means of achieving domination.
Basically, there's no guarantee that any of the companies will keep a fair competition, and this is the problem I see with competition in IT. The problem is that IT is a domain that still has a huge way to progress. Unfair competition in the market of fizzy drinks can't do any harm to buyers. Unfair competition in IT has already set us back several years, in at least a couple of important sectors (usability, WWW etc.)
Member since:2005-07-06
competition on the same standard is diferent than competing standards.
Competition is always good, the problem here is that competing standards create a difficult time till one wins.
Think IE. It got no competition, so no updates in 6 years.
Now FF is the competition, and sudenly we have IE7.
Member since:2005-07-24
"""
Now FF is the competition, and sudenly we have IE7.
"""
I'd hardly say "suddenly". It took a long time to get development rolling again, since IE had been dormant for so long.
The keystone cops style fiasco of Mozilla, from initial Netscape source code release, through the hugely unpopular Mozilla Suite, to its emergence as the relatively (though still marginally) successful Firefox, is probably outside the scope of this thread.
But in the end, yes, FF has, through competition, benefited users of both browsers, as well as those of other browsers.
The free market... and competition... work. Albeit sometimes on an excruciatingly long time scale. It's a slow process anyway. And there are so many ways for the more powerful entities to game the system.
But in the end, the gaming... the cheats... end up doing nothing but buying time. And the abusing party has to actually get back to reality and compete.
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Member since:
2005-11-10
The CD was invented collaboratively. Why not a single successor to DVD? Now we get stupid crap like Paramount going HD-DVD only and screwing over every single BluRay owner (including Sony's PS3), for what is essentially the exact same content and quality. This is an anti-competitive action brought about by the presence of competition in the first place.
If there was a single standard agreed on for HD content, then we wouldn't be having this stupid game of charades and trying to justify that the expensive BluRay player people have bought, is not in fact junk.
There shouldn't have to be a BluRay / HD-DVD battle in the first place! Having a Winner of a pointless war proves nothing what so ever.