Essay: Are you competing with or competing against?


	Do You Compete With or Compete Against? Are your competitors valuable resources or enemies? by Edwin Lee Some years ago I went to a wine festival luncheon in Monterey and heard Tim Mondavi, a leading wine maker, give a remarkable talk about competition. He began by saying the he thought there were two renaissance industries in California: electronics and wine making. He didn't venture any guesses about electronics...but he suggested that the rapid growth and improvements in wine making were because the wine makers were *competing with* each other rather than competing against each other. Winemakers compete vigorously in the marketplace with their personal ideas about how to make wine and how it should taste. However, they use each other as resources in two ways: First they see whose ideas gain public acceptance and then use those achievements as a springboard to do better. They applaud and learn from one another's success and they don't seek one another's failure. In fact, they actively share ideas about how to make better wines. There is little secrecy. Second, whenever any winemaker has operating problems with picking, bottling, etc. his competitors gladly help him solve those problems with their time, talents, and equipment. When you stop to think about it, the great athletes and athletic teams also compete with each other. They agree on the rules of competition, learn from each other, and then vigorously compete in their events. World class athletes know that they need each other to develop and sustain their best performances. They also need each other to generate and sustain public interest. When we *compete with* others, we recognize that they are valuable resources, essential to our own rapid progress, optimum achievement, and long term health. Because we respect them, we respect what they accomplish and learn from them. We sustain vigorous competition in one area by cooperating in a host of other areas. We share an element of playfulness and a strong sense of us! When we *compete against* others, we treat them as obstacles to our success and enemies to be conquered. We close our minds to learning from them. We fail to co-operate for the common good (which necessarily includes the good of our customers). We operate in fear and a strong sense of *not us*.

Do You Compete With or Compete Against?
Are your competitors valuable resources or enemies?

by Edwin Lee

Some years ago I went to a wine festival luncheon in Monterey and heard Tim Mondavi, a leading wine maker, give a remarkable talk about competition. He began by saying the he thought there were two renaissance industries in California: electronics and wine making. He didn't venture any guesses about electronics...but he suggested that the rapid growth and improvements in wine making were because the wine makers were competing with each other rather than competing against each other.

Winemakers compete vigorously in the marketplace with their personal ideas about how to make wine and how it should taste. However, they use each other as resources in two ways: First they see whose ideas gain public acceptance and then use those achievements as a springboard to do better. They applaud and learn from one another's success and they don't seek one another's failure. In fact, they actively share ideas about how to make better wines. There is little secrecy. Second, whenever any winemaker has operating problems with picking, bottling, etc. his competitors gladly help him solve those problems with their time, talents, and equipment.

When you stop to think about it, the great athletes and athletic teams also compete with each other. They agree on the rules of competition, learn from each other, and then vigorously compete in their events. World class athletes know that they need each other to develop and sustain their best performances. They also need each other to generate and sustain public interest.

When we compete with others, we recognize that they are valuable resources, essential to our own rapid progress, optimum achievement, and long term health. Because we respect them, we respect what they accomplish and learn from them. We sustain vigorous competition in one area by cooperating in a host of other areas. We share an element of playfulness and a strong sense of us!
When we compete against others, we treat them as obstacles to our success and enemies to be conquered. We close our minds to learning from them. We fail to co-operate for the common good (which necessarily includes the good of our customers). We operate in fear and a strong sense of not us.

"Competing with" is a win-win for business
I believe that the principle of competing with is as valuable and necessary in electronics as it is in wine making or sports. We have advanced rapidly in the hardware side of electronics because engineers share their ideas in papers and conferences and leverage new achievements from the products and ideas of others. Engineers have created a diversity of options for most customers and they constantly improve choices by responding to customer preferences. Engineers get a minimum of government protection in the form of patents. Limited protection for seventeen years upon proof of uniqueness and upon full public disclosure; so that others may try to outdo them.

Open standards are one result of competing with. These are technical standards, for example the IBM PC Bus or Intel's new PCI Bus, which were developed by one company or a group of companies and then put in the public domain for everyone to use.
Hewlett Packard was probably the first, and is certainly the most consistent, company to contribute to open standards in electronics. It is no coincidence that it has an unparalleled 50 year+ history of growth and profits, has sustained its innovative spirit, and continues to attract and retain some of the finest people in our industry.

Fig. 1: Competing with takes speed and skill. The schooner's massive sails and sleek design enabled its crew to outrun other ships. It carried no armaments to slow it down.

"Competing against" stymies progress
Examples of competing against include Apple's retention of proprietary control of its Macintosh hardware and software standards, IBM's proprietary control of Microchannel, and Microsoft's proprietary control of everything it touches.
Competing against fosters secrecy and a control mentality within a company and between a company and its customers. Progress is slow and painful. Technologists in different departments withhold information from one another to protect their turf. Competitors plant "minefields" (that's "mine") for one another and for their customers with patents, copyrights, and trade secrets. They stifle progress: their own, their customers,' and their competitors.'

Fig. 2: Competing against sacrifices speed to carry armaments. Spanish galleons wallowed across the ocean brimming with cannons. Crews relied on armaments to protect the loot their government had authorized them to steal from the New World.

The overprotection provided by Copyrights exacerbates this problem. Software folks get 75 years of government protection without having to prove design uniqueness and without having to make public disclosures. Consequently, the software industry is rampant with hidden "mine-fields." Overprotection, like other forms of governmental welfare, rewards the selfishness which has slowed progress in the development of software to a painful crawl.

In 1960, we designed computers at Burroughs ElectroData using 10 cent resistors, $3 transistors, and $25 per bit memories. The software people designed multi-tasking, multi-user operating systems and wrote their programs in COBOL and ALGOL....a few lines of code per person per day. Today, engineers use $3 integrated circuits that do more and include more circuits than the computers we designed then. However, the software industry is still working on multi-user, multi-tasking operating systems, and is still writing a few lines of code per person per day. The only significant change is in the languages of choice.

Competing with would give the software industry a much needed enema.
Competing with would help Apple.
Competing with improves corporate health, stimulates performance, attracts better people, and improves job satisfaction.

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