[funkdefino]

This thread is not a platform war. So if that’s is what your looking for please move along.

Alright, so a “long” time ago this guy named Steve starts a hard/software company. His intent is to be the best. He has original ideas and develops a slick well-built product. Shortly after, this other guy Bill pretty much copies Steve’s software (not very well I might ad) and jumps into the game with the intent of competing. There is a fundamental difference though between the two. Steve builds hardware to go with his software and Bill does not. Steve thinks it is important for people to write software for his hardware because he believes his hardware is the best. Bill only writes software for hardware that can be built by anyone. He believes that it is better to be good and affordable rather than being the best and expensive. It goes even further though. Steve’s ideas and products remain proprietary while Bill licenses his ideas and products to whoever wants to develop other compatible products.

This is where things get interesting. Crème will undoubtedly rise to the top.

Steve’s products did very well. Everyone recognized that Steve had made the best product and anyone who was looking for quality chose Steve and his companies’ products without thinking of the price. On the other hand many people could not afford Steve’s products and did not need a product so robust for their small tasks. This is where Bill came in. His software did similar things that Steve’s software did, but on hardware that was much cheaper. Yes it wasn’t as well thought out, and it wasn’t as fast, and it definitely wasn’t as pretty, but it was affordable. The bottom line was that Bill’s product got the job done for much less. As time went by more and more people started using Bill’s product. As more and more people started using these inferior products people started developing ways to make these inferior products better. It took a long time but eventually the line between using Steve’s great product and Bill’s not so great product began to blur. Bill had built an army whose only battle was to make the best software in the world using his technology. This army knew that as their numbers grew so would the quality of the products that they used.

Ultimately Steve stands behind the notion that his products are the best. He continues to build lightning fast machinery and flawlessly executed software to go along with it. Unfortunately his proprietary for the sake of proprietary, and uniform standards are becoming the death of him. How can you continue being the best when more than half the world is out to be better than you? More people everyday are realizing that you don’t need Steve’s products to get the job done and get it done quickly. In some cases they are realizing there are things Steve’s products don’t do that Bill’s do.

We haven’t seen the end of this story yet, but I’m sure you can see where it is going.

There is a lesson in there somewhere if you read it closely enough. [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]