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“Competition is a Sin”
“Competition is a sin.” — John D. Rockefeller
John D. Rockefeller believed competition was a sin. But why? Do you think it could be that most big businessmen and businesswomen prefer to not have competition?
Of course. Competition to them means more work and more costs without necessarily any more profits. This isn’t to say every business person hates competition (some thrive on it, I’m sure) but it’s easy to understand why many prefer to be the only business with that particular product or service. I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be nice if my blog was the only one on the net and everyone had to read it.
But what about the consumer?
Competition to the consumer is necessary in order to ensure we are getting the best possible product or service at the best possible prices.
Those in the computer industry know this all to well. I remember my father purchasing a computer in the mid 1990s for $2,000 and it was a 60 MHz Pentium 1, had a CD drive (CD burners hadn’t even been invented yet) and the hard drive was less than 1 GB.
Now for $200 (even aside from Black Friday sales) you can purchase a computer that is a Pentium 4, 2 GHz (2,000 MHz) and a 500 GB hard drive. 1/10th the cost yet 33 times more speed and over 500 times the hard drive space. Not to mention it will come with a DVD burner, not just a boring CD-ROM drive.
What is the cause of this and all other electronics getting cheaper and cheaper?
Cheaper supplies and labor have a little bit to do with it. But primarily it’s competition among various companies.
This is one reason I’m not a fan of Apple — they don’t allow others to build computers under their name and their monopolistic tendencies means not only less profits for them (something their okay with since they’re rolling in dough already) but more expensive product for the consumer (a 2Ghz, 250 GB Macbook with DVD burner is $1,000 while a comparable PC is less than $500).
Mac fans will argue, though, that Mac is better and different and that I’m comparing apples (no pun intended) to oranges. It’s true that the Macbook cannot be compared directly with PCs since the processor, batteries, customer service, etc are all different. But when it comes to…