Worth reading if for no other thing this bit of wisdom followed by gaming company examples, like I use Microsoft and its Office competitors after the introduction of Windows 3.0 showed they'd lost their ability to write software that basically worked:
"Over the last few years, I’ve learned a lot about competition. The biggest lesson has been that in most cases, products and companies live and die by their own actions, not their competitors’."
Eh, I like the article, but Marco kind of undercuts this little pearl of wisdom not too far down:
"... Sega threw away the Genesis’ tremendous fanbase and success by sloppily releasing the Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn, all of which were overpriced, uncompetitive, and poorly supported by game developers and Sega itself."
No company exists in a vacuum. This is why we promote competition and eschew monopolies, right?
Depends. Earned monopolies are not so bad, and Microsoft earned their early Windows 3.x one. At least compared to early OS/2 (crippled by IBM policy limiting it to 286 mode) and everything else I tried at the time.
And not following this field (RSI means I had to give up on games decades ago) I don't know what the author means by "uncompetitive", but if that's in concert with the overpriced, as in less features for more money, it's all of a piece, even if not as dire as the Windows Office examples.
i'd argue that this is a myopic view. isn't the success of a product or company determined by customers? and the customers are making decisions which include evaluating competitors...
But if you fail to technically execute, as Microsoft's competitors did except for Word Perfect, customers won't even get a chance to evaluate your product.
If you're late and your product is impossibly buggy, like Word Perfect, even your most loyal customers will defect.
I'm assuming people who watch gaming will be able to apply the above sort of analysis ... but that of course depends on just how awful these failing products were, something I don't know.
still, if there was no competition for a word processor, then WordPerfect would have been the only option for customers that wanted a word processor...
Clearly you never used Word Perfect for Windows ^_^.
OK, I didn't, but a lawyer friend who was a very loyal to the DOS version did, and gave up because it kept dropping his tables and such to the bottom of the document. I guess you could have used it as an electronic typewriter for the most basic of stuff, but in your hypothetical I would have gone back to TeX, Scribe or even nroff if I really needed things like tables.
However, I didn't have to do that, I could and did buy a copy of Microsoft's solid Word for Windows (on floppies, even).
"Over the last few years, I’ve learned a lot about competition. The biggest lesson has been that in most cases, products and companies live and die by their own actions, not their competitors’."