Competition is good. It drives us to be better employees, better companies, and to do things we might not have known we were capable of had we not been challenged.
I think back to baseball’s 1998 season. The biggest story of that season, obviously, was Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire’s race to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record. The record had stood since 1961, and to have two people in one season vying for the chance (and both eventually setting higher totals than Maris) was incredible. It’s highly likely that, had the two men not been matching each other bomb for bomb, neither would have reached the totals they did. They pushed each other, even encouraged each other, and partly through that they were able to achieve something that left the nation in wonder and awe.
They were also accused of cheating.
A few years later, when one of Major League Baseball’s darkest eras came about, both men were accused of taking performance enhancing drugs. It’s quite likely that PEDs contributed to what those men were able to do that season. That’s the darker side of competition. It can cause us to act with questionable character to get ahead. Cheating is most certainly wrong, but then again, some say that the 1998 season saved baseball.
These days it’s not rare for rival companies to be overly competitive with one another. There’s a reason our country has laws against monopolies. People deserve options, and having those options prevents one company from controlling everything and doing something like jacking up their prices, or providing lackluster products, without losing customers. Once again, all good things, but there is simply more to it.
Consider Apple and Samsung. The two tech giants, and manufacturers of the most popular mobile phones in the world, have been involved in court battles for over a year. Apple sued Samsung for patent violations based on certain similarities between their phones, like the “pinch-to-zoom” function. The two companies ended up becoming involved in over 50 legal battles spread out through courts in different countries. Too much has happened to list everything, but here’s a quick rundown. Apple won its initial suit in the US, and was awarded a substantial sum of money as a result. Samsung has won in several other countries, as well as returning the favor and suing Apple for other patent infringements. It’s been a constant back and forth for years, and there doesn’t appear to be an end in sight.
Every company deserves to have its trademarked and patented ideas protected, and they should have the right to sue if those ideas are stolen, but it really isn’t that simple. Clearly it’s a grey area involving what you can and can’t sue a company over, the differing court decisions in the Apple/Samsung cases are proof enough of that. That’s not the worst part though. No matter who wins these suits, the consumers lose. It stifles the advancement of technology when some of these finer points become restricted to one company. Imagine the automobile industry if only one company were able to patent wheels, brakes, or automatic transmissions. It doesn’t even appear to be about protecting products anymore. The war between these two rival companies has grown into one of malice.
That’s one side of the coin.
Sometimes, a company can surprise you with a gesture to their rivals. It may be a rather specific subculture, but this happened recently in the videogame industry. The console wars between Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft can get pretty heated, especially between Sony and Microsoft. Both companies are in the midst of releasing their next-gen consoles. When Microsoft announced its Xbox One last May, there were some features that consumers were a little less than thrilled about. Sony announced its Playstation 4 the next day, and they made sure to highlight that their console was free of those features. It got a little ugly. Fast forward to last Friday when the PS4 was released in the United States. Microsoft tweeted a message to Sony, congratulating them on their launch. It was a gesture of good faith that took the gaming community by surprise, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Sony return the favor this Friday when the Xbox One is released.
It’s very easy to get caught up in competition. Nobody likes losing, and the goal of every company is (or should be) to be the best in their respective industries. That being said, success should be achieved through respectable means. There’s nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, but nobody really wins when we let it get out of hand.
