On the other hand, sometimes your major sustainable competitive advantage is your IP. My current employer has developed an algorithm that pretty much blows anyb

On the other hand, sometimes your major sustainable competitive advantage is your IP. My current employer has developed an algorithm that pretty much blows anybody else out of the water for what we're doing and they most definitely don't want anybody else learning about it. Granted, their strategy is simply don't tell anybody (All I know is we have the algorithm, not what it is), but protection of IP can be important in some cases. If what you're protecting will be obvious once your product is out there, then yes an NDA is pointless. However, if you want to protect some behind-the-scenes technology that won't be evident to anybody using your product, then an NDA may be in order.