On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 1:47 PM, FT2 <ft2.w...@gmail.com> wrote: > Pride matters, arrogance is harmful. What we have achieved is to demonstrate > that legitimate, free, open, collaborative knowledge is to be taken > seriously, and some knowhow about its creation and maintenance. That's not a > reason for arrogance and does not mean we are "best" or have some kind of > guarantee for future. > > Commercially, enterprises often flourish in an ecosystem of similar > enterprises or related needs. Those lacking competitors and alternatives > tend over years and decades to become lazy, inefficient, and complacent. > Those with others around have the "best the rest of the world can devise" to > measure up to, compare with, and provoke improvement. > > Like others have said, we need others around. Maybe not today or tomorrow, > but for the future.
There are two schools of thought here - One, that competition is always great and effective. Two, that sometimes a natural monopoly develops of some sort, and that for the time that the paradigm remains valid there's really only one player of note. The Internet sees examples of both types of activity. Google has search competitors, by dint of Yahoo not having gone bankrupt quite yet and Microsoft having thrown Bing in as the default search engine for the OS of choice for 90% plus of the computers sold today (plus a lot of phones). A lot of people want it to be in Category One, but it seems to be at least marginally a Category Two case. Craigslist killed a whole paradigm (classified ads in print newspapers) and has not evolved any useful competition. Ebay took the rest of that market, and invented a new market, and has not had any credible competitor. Both are Category Two. Amazon invented its field, but has active competition (Borders, B&N at least). Clearly Category One. The Internet Archive has no (public) competition. Nobody's even interested. The social network website arena has had intense competition, which is settling down into a Category Two monopoly around Facebook. Twitter fused SMS with broadcast and has not evolved any competition; Category Two again. Skype is only one of many internet phone services now. For nonprofit / public service organizations, there's an ulterior motive in any case. Two, actually... The exterior ulterior motive is helping other people, and the not-so-secret personal or interior ulterior motive, that people enjoy being seen as contributors and participants, it's an ego boost. Neither of those ulterior motives is like the motives for a business, which are primarily to make money (preserve and gain market share and margins). We have analogs to "market share" and "margins" but they're not the same. Because they're not the same, some of the inertial resistance to change is different and operates in different mechanisms. Wikipedia remakes itself regularly, though there are longterm participants, rules, and goals. We change the software, editing standards, our IP license, community membership and active editors set, community participation and rules. We actively and moderately skeptically review all the policy and core values in the community. Because of that, I think we're more effective at responding to pressure to change than a typical business. In some ways we aren't - we lack "leadership" in many senses of the word, though we have leaders who people listen to and who focus discussion and debate. But we aren't institutionally opposed to changing things to make them better. We don't need an external competitor to tell us that we have problems, to the degree businesses often do. I won't pretend that we're really good at it; the community is analagous to herding cats in many ways, and people are resistant to change at times and in some ways. But I think we're better enough, in some key ways. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l