[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.