13 ms·
I am your co-creator, not your competitor
- Aura1 13y agoCan't navigate back button on the "Docs" page.
- waylandsmithers 13y agoThank 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. 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.
- acangiano 13y agoIt's worth noting that Susan G. Komen was an innocent woman who died of breast cancer back in 1980. The questionable practices you mention are carried out by the homonymous association created in her memory by her sister (who is the CEO at the tune of $684K/year).
- elwell 13y agowha? that's insane.
- aethertap 13y agoI think this is very dependent on what you're actually doing. I'm involved in an attempt to bring some more sustainable/regenerative methods and technology to agriculture, and in that space I'm glad to see anybody show up who's doing the same. I don't have competitors (in my view), because I have a gigantic task in front of me and my main concern is to see that it gets done (even though I'm trying to make money on it at the same time). I go out of my way to help other people who are trying to make a buck in my space. On the other hand, if you're selling a commodity (e.g. gasoline), then it's pretty hard to say that the guy across the street isn't competition. Perhaps there's a spectrum of appropriateness for cooperation/competition between these two extremes?
- chc 13y agoWell, I think the basic idea is that if you aren't driven primarily by profit, then as long as the other guy isn't putting you out of business, you have no need to put him out of business. Two gas stations can exist near each other and be quite profitable.
- hammock 13y agoAlso known as an abundance mentality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People#Abundance_mentality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effe...
- k3oni 13y agoThanks for the link. An important quote from that "the abundance mentality arises from having a high self-worth and security and leads to the sharing of profits, recognition and responsibility". That point is a bit hard to apply in real world due to the general nature of our inner self or the circles we are exposed to.
- dingdingdang 13y agoYour site scrolls 100% on the horizontal axis - it needs a bit of co-creative fixing.
- littke 13y agohaha... yes. why don't you co-creatively suggest a fix? :D
- dchuk 13y agoYour <article> for some reason is using position: absolute. In this style: ".main-content#blog article:after, .main-content #blog article:after", just delete the position: absolute line (not sure where that is in your css file as yours is concatenated/minified in your theme).
- littke 13y agoThank you.
- loceng 13y agoThe true value of this mentality isn't possible while in the current structure of our capitalistic systems.
- asgard1024 13y agoI absolutely agree. If we had a basic income, at least, I can imagine it working. But now there is just too many people working on creating artificial scarcity to keep most of the population in fear.
- loceng 13y agoI wonder what happens though then if everyone has say a basic income, with when competition does exist; This model is directly in competition with those who want to compete. Those who want to be competitive will gather ideas and try to execute on them better - very much like how the VC model really works; People desperate for money to make their idea happen flood to VCs and other investors sharing their ideas and even full business plans, giving a clear picture of the landscape ... meanwhile then those who are acting in a competitive way will be the ones who will benefit the most. So it comes down to a question of if we want to allow specific organizations to amass and control huge amounts of resources, and if so, what in return must they guarantee us - how must they benefit us, etc.. ingrained in this could be the idea of accountability and responsibility, and if they don't live up to defined expectations then they lose the powers we have allowed them to amass. If someone has proven they are highly capable of organizing and managing resources in a non-violent, sustainable, kind, and fair way - then I would want them to have access to whatever resources they need to continue this.
- dethstar 13y agoMhmm, does the competitive model really make the gathering and executing of ideas better? If that was true we would have thousands of ISPs, Office suites, etc. With way better technology and what not. But they are all looking for ways to lock out their competition instead of making a better product. So I'm not sure the competition is what pushes us towards.
- 13y ago
- angrybits 13y agoIf we are going after the same wallet on the same product, then we are competitors. Not acknowledging me as such doesn't make it any less true.
- wudf 13y agokeep your friends close and enemies closer
- rhizome 13y agoInternalizing Sun-Tzu is possibly the worst thing ever to happen to business.
- michaelochurch 13y agoYes, yes, I agree fully. The problem is that the philistines can't motivate themselves to do anything 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!) effeminate. 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. 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 refuse (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. 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 best 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. I'd love 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 not in competition. We're just trying to fucking live well. No one has to lose.
- loceng 13y agoWell said. This is closer around the corner than most can realize.
- exelius 13y agoFacebook may not care about crushing anyone, but by virtue of their size and reach they can inadvertently crush people by launching a product because Facebook thinks it would be a useful product for their users. Companies rarely do things out of spite like that; but the idea is if your market is really worth some money, Facebook or Google will eventually be interested in it and your goal is to be big enough by the time that happens to successfully compete with them (or sell to them.) If your idea is really a good one, these companies have enough smart people working for them that they will come to it on their own eventually.
- quadrangle 13y agoStupid site is totally broken with NoScript even though all that matters in it is plain text. 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.
- littke 13y agoThe site is powered entirely by MeteorJS. There's a no-script version generated by Phantom but I guess it's not made for viewing. Sorry about that.
- null_ptr 13y agoThere was a brief period a few years ago when the leading web design trend was to make pages simple, fast, and accessible. Out the window those all went.
- jotm 13y agoBut seriously, is there any reasonable advantage to putting a JS layer between the user and the HTML/CSS?
- littke 13y agoYes. It makes for a much more fluid experience (at least if you have JS ;)), similar to that of a desktop app. The web was originally built to be a set of individual pages but that's not how we want things to behave today. Building a UI with Meteor.com where the JS controls all the interaction, page switching, event handling and automatic data updates is sooo much simpler than requiring a full page refresh or using AJAX to modify individual components. If the DOM is built up by JS in the first place, it makes it very simple to change it by JS. Read more about Meteor's philosophy in the first paragraphs of their docs, here: http://docs.meteor.com/ http://docs.meteor.com/ The downside is that if you don't have JS, you can't do much. In our case it was a price we decided to pay.
- ecocentrik 13y agoThe 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.
- littke 13y agoYes, I noticed this too (it's mentioned in the footnotes). That's not the concept refer to in the post though, and I was a little bit annoyed when I first found out about it after having drafted the majority of this article :)
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoIts 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. 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.
- MarkPNeyer 13y agopeople doing this ruin the market for everyone else they are in. i believe this ultimately hurts them, too. once people start figuring out that public image matters more than anything else, and that the public likes helpful people more than they like assholes, i think this will change.
- csallen 13y agoUnfortunately, people don't have the time or the energy to investigate the minor behavioral details of every company they buy from. Thus, even if you are a tremendous asshole, it's not overly difficult to conceal this from the public while you go about your business of crushing competitors.
- rhizome 13y agoonce people start figuring out that public image matters more than anything else, and that the public likes helpful people more than they like assholes, i think this will change. From Dick Cheney, to Maury Povich, to apparently every university business program, to popular sports, the entire Western cultural environment has been oriented around treating personal endeavors as zero-sum games. There is a thing called winning, only one person/group can win, and it better not be the other guy who gets it. For generations, at least since the Gilded Age, cooperation and commmunitarianism has been subsumed under individual success. Where do you see people figuring out that things should (or even could) change from this entrenched state of affairs? Are you saying we need a cultural revolution? Because that wasn't very fun for the little guy the last few times it occurred. UPDATE: Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354012
- aashishkoirala 13y agoOh yes, and we can all gather around and sing kumbaya and hug each other. Get real and give me a break!
- javajosh 13y agoAnd yet, if you're an apple farmer, you don't want 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. 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. 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.
- joeframbach 13y agoWhen 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.
- littke 13y agoWell, that's interesting. I guess it's about "living at the forefront of human invention", right? But at the same time, only doing that obviously leads no where. I (the OP of the co-creation post) wrote a blog post called 'A life designed by intuition', describing the opposite of what your PM is doing: http://littke.com/2013/11/11/a-life-designed-by-intuition.html http://littke.com/2013/11/11/a-life-designed-by-intuition.ht... As always, it's about a healthy balance :)
- dpeck 13y agoIf someone says it isn't about the money, it's about the money.
- jotm 13y agoNot really, you could really want to work just for the betterment of mankind - but the money are a necessity, and sooner or later everyone realizes that (which then makes them look stupid/hypocritical).
- PaulHoule 13y agoAnother issue is that a competitor validates your concept. 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.
- cordite 13y agoHow do they do that loading thing at the top with the green bar? I've seen similar with red on Youtube, but I just assumed it was a google perk for running on google chrome.
- shurcooL 13y agoI like and with this mindset very much! Thanks for giving me a useful term to describe this movement.
- elwell 13y agoFrom the comments by author: > The final outcome might also be better if we do it ourselves rather than give everything away. Yeah, that pretty much allows for negating everything above.