[heintje_ghulam]

I think the difference is that Emacs isn't a company, and it doesn't need to beat others in a competition, it just needs enough contributors to keep moving forward. Not everyone needs to use Emacs for Emacs to succeed in its goals.

[erik_seaberg]

True, I was thinking of http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html (where Lisp was Viaweb's "secret weapon"). And I'm worried about Emacs ending up with too small an audience of package maintainers to cover mainstream workplace use cases.