[glenra]

Competition is a discovery process; if we knew the right answer ahead of time we might not need it. Having ten companies try ten different strategies is likely to find the right answer - the product that best fits our current set of technical/financial/social constraints - faster than having ten companies get together and hold joint meetings trying to get cooperation on ONE strategy only to discover it doesn't work, so they hold more meetings to convince the group to try ANOTHER strategy, discover it doesn't work either...until decades have passed. Attacking this kind of challenge serially instead of in parallel, by the time they have something that works the problem domain is likely to have entirely changed.

And sure, independent companies competing might all fail - some problems just can't be solved - but the odds of success are better. It's like the difference between having a dozen archers all aim arrows at a target, versus having the dozen archers all try together to cooperatively fire one arrow at the target.

[saurik]

I don't even understand where you got this straw man from of "everyone should work on one thing". You do realize there are more targets out there, right? The reality of the market right now is that unless you put sufficiently high of a reward on hitting one target that you get ten people aiming arrows at it, no one bothers to fire arrows at all... there are so many things for mankind to be accomplishing :/... we just flat out don't need to figure out how to hit that target so dead center that we need ten people aiming at it: we should have people aiming at all the other targets. The most charitable version of your argument is "people don't work that way", but that's what is so depressing: people are just flat out disappointing. If we weren't so depressing that we needed competition to motivate us, we could achieve so many things it would boggle the mind.

[ObsoleteNerd]

What's wrong with 10 companies working together to try 10 different things, then eliminate the poorer performing ones, increasing resources on the better ones, until there's 1 winner they've all agreed on?

Seems a lot more logical than 10 companies working on 10 things where 8 doing the exact same thing and wasting 8x the resources.

[glenra]

> What's wrong with 10 companies working together to try 10 different things, then eliminate the poorer performing ones, increasing resources on the better ones, until there's 1 winner they've all agreed on?

Isn't that exactly what the market does? The company that is doing a better job makes more money which increases that company's available resources to improve the product and sell more of it, while the companies that are doing a worse job tend to make less money and eventually give up and do something else.

Apple tends to enter a business when they have a clear competitive edge based on features other companies aren't providing. They will putter around refining a new technology for a while in the labs without selling it then eventually find there either is or isn't a clear window for them to sell something great that does something existing products don't do. If the window is there, they jump in with both feet. If not, they go back to the drawing board and putter some more.

Companies working separately will automatically try different things, because separate companies have different strengths and different understandings of the problem space. Absent the kind of cooperation you want there's just about zero chance that Microsoft, Apple and Google would all be doing or attempting "the exact same thing". They're attempting different things, with different odds of success.