Will the Competition Ever Root for You?
The world we live in is highly competitive—competition among products, competition among individuals, competition in professional and personal lives, and competition against yourself—the manifestations it can take are endless. Competition isn't always a bad thing. Healthy competition is important to ensure there is evolution, innovation, and progression.
As we progress and mature in what we do, society is also beginning to accept that competition need not always mean isolating yourself from others and performing actions in stealth to keep yourself ahead. While such a stealth mode of operation may be important at times, the IT world has begun toembrace competition in a more collaborative manner.
There is increasing acceptance of the benefits collaborative competition can bring, including enhancing an entrepreneur’s bottom line, promoting rich alliances and partnerships, openly discussing and solving market challenges, and even possibly creating a new market together. All of these create a win-win scenario for the competitors while maintaining their healthy competitive stance among users, benefiting the market as a whole. Players are beginning to understand that at a bare minimum, it is goodto not bash competitors in order to peacefully co-exist in the market.
A new trend that is increasing and is welcoming to see is competitors rooting for another competitor. Granted, this does not and will not happen often, but when it does, there is a very strong reason behind it. That reason is to build a new market that smaller competitors may not be able to accomplish but that a bigger competitor may be able to pull through more effectively.
The wearables market is at this crossroad today. Competitors want Apple to succeed with its watch to show the world the potential of the wearables market. They are not concerned that Apple through its success would hold a large part of the market share for itself. Apple’s reach, trustworthiness, and acceptance is so high globally that they want to leverage all these pieces to create a long-standing market for wearable devices and applications.
Once this is done, they believe the market potential will be so high that even small and new players will have a space of their own to co-exist. While this is in one sense a segment of collaborative competition, it also falls into a segment of its own, where competitors ride Apple’s wave of success, rooting for Apple, and then garnering a smaller wave for themselves to ride on.
2015 will be an important year where we'll see the performance of the Apple watch, the market acceptance for wearables, and whether all of this rooting for Apple pays off with newer players building their own solid existence in both the devices and applications space.
