competition is good?

competition is good?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 20:04 UTC (Thu) by kamil (subscriber, #3802)
In reply to: competition is good? by vmole
Parent article: Linux and flash

You are right, my statement regarding a lack of NIH in Europe was rather silly, and your counterexample spot-on. Galileo always seemed like a waste of money to me, as it is extremely unlikely that GPS would ever become unavailable or go back to lower resolution (too many U.S. companies depend on it, and in the U.S. "it's the economy, stupid"). Then again, I don't know the full story; maybe there are better reasons for Galileo than "because we can" or "because we don't trust Yankees".

Going back to where it all started ("competition is good?"), how to define competition? Is a market more competitive if there are multiple technologies competing (cellular phone market in the U.S.) or multiple providers using the same technology (mobile phone market in Europe)? I think any European visiting the U.S. who had to experience its pathetic cellular networks knows the answer already.

So the way I see it, it is probably OK that, e.g., there is "digikam", "kphotoalbum", and all the other photo archiving programs, but not that there is Gnome and KDE, as users tend to limit themselves to apps developed specifically for their preferred desktop, so with multiple desktop environments, the competition where it really matters (apps) actually becomes smaller.

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