Blogger Con: The Rule of Win-Win
A corollary to the Rule, there is no such thing as a Win-Lose. I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve never seen it happen. Microsoft dominates Web browsers, but can’t make the browser go anywhere after they own it. Lotus dominates spreadsheets, but fails to make the transition to GUIs. There must be a thousand examples. When you become the only winner, you plant the seeds for your own loss at the same instant.
Sometimes Dave Winer can transcend his penchant for ego-driven self-aggrandizement and offer an insight. The above is an excerpt from an example of that . . . .
It is perhaps paradoxical or counter-intuitive to think that 2+2 can equal 5 while 2+0=0: playing the marketplace as a zero-sum game means no one wins, even the dominant player. But perhaps that make the technology business more like art, where each new idea or paradigm is part of a continuum of ideas, than like manufacturing where the market matures more quickly and the players don’t change very often. This could also be a side-effect of the immaturity of the software business: software on a personal scale has only existed since the personal computer, or about 25 years. Many common manufactured goods reached their present form a century ago . . .