Collaboration is the new form of competition

I thought I would touch on the topic of collaboration between businesses today. Competition in our technology-driven society is ever becoming more ferocious. What drives this competition? Who will win the titanic virtual battle of the 21st century?

In the beginning, there was a marketplace. People shouting over each other to get your attention in order to make the killer sale. Then came supermarkets, and shopping centres. A solitary room or building of goods or services sold by one vendor. These supermarkets grew and grew, until a little thing called the internet reared it's eager head. This became a whole new ballgame. Along the way, business corporations learned that it was vital to integrate with other businesses in order to stay afloat. These relationships can be seen everywhere, from the obvious example of Facebook integrating with Microsoft to mutually benefit, swapping huge money for a small percentage of the social networking company, to quiet, simple collaborations such as Google and Wikipedia. On BusinessWeek.com they spoke that when Wikipedia needed millions of dollars to stay afloat, Google donated 2million. They had done this because they had been quietly benefiting from Wikipedia's huge array of information, that would be top of the list on nearly every search. This in turn would create advertisement revenue for Google, and so the integration was made when they basically saved Wikipedia from going bankrupt.

In this video, I thought it was important to highlight the fact that the result of the same question is pretty much 50/50. I like to think that battle is only beginning.

This form of e-Business will become more apparent in years to come because what these internet giants want is knowledge, and there is so much more they don't know about us. There is one thing that interested me though, where do Apple come into the equation in this bid for "first place", because it seems like Microsoft may be a little preoccupied with Google, and a computer company that build their own hardware and software seem to be a much greater threat. I think this video, highly biased towards Apple of course, can explain what I mean.

After writing about this, and researching about collaboration, I discovered after learning about how businesses benefit from working with each other, that the internet may provide us with high quality information, but to attain somebody's opinions and thoughts is a much more difficult thing to achieve. If this can be correctly used, it could change the world wide web as we know it.

Robert Dineen