Competition is Bad in the Tech World

athlete_competes_202392We have long believed that competition is a good thing; it causes companies to put a lot of thought and work into their product to make it better and cheaper than those of their competitors. It is always better to have competition to ensure that we as consumers have the best choices available to us, especially in the tech world with all the phones and gadgets we love. Are we correct in believing that? Just take a tour of the tech coverage, and you begin to think that competition must be a bad thing.

When word comes out about an upcoming tech product, the first thing that starts appearing is how this new product will be a “gadget x killer.” You know what I’m talking about. There have been no fewer than a dozen smartphones that were going to be the big “iPhone killer.” Some of these gadgets were going to be “BlackBerry killers” or “Windows Mobile killers.” It seems that every new smartphone is going to kill off some other phone. That must mean that competition is a bad thing if we all want a new product to kill off an existing one. It must be better to have only one product in a category, right?

Netbooks, those cheap, little notebooks that have taken the tech world by storm, have been “notebook killers” since they appeared. MIDs have also been touted as “notebook killers.” Those notebooks must need killing off with everything out to get them. Those of us who cover the tech world must believe it is, so as we keep anointing products as killers of something else. It must mean that competition is a bad thing, or we wouldn’t want it killed off so regularly.

Consumers feel that way, too, no matter what you think. Check the comments on a review of any new tech product, and you’ll be inundated with claims that the product will kill off the competition and that it will be deserved because all other products “suck.” In any given tech category, there is obviously only one product that deserves to live and all others need to go away. It’s repeated too often to not be true.

Now that we have come to grips that competition in the tech world is a bad thing, there only remains one important task. That is deciding which single product in each category is the one that lives. That will be the hard part, I am pretty sure.

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