Steve Fenton

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Wednesday, 7th December 2011

Competition is really important. I think people have forgotten this despite many recent examples of how terrible things become if you don't have any.

Before I get going, I declare my interest in this debate. I happened to write some open-source software that I gave away for free under the Apache 2.0 license. I made the source code and loads of examples available on GitHub. Strangely, this offended some people because a similar project already existed.

So on to case number 1. Internet Explorer 6 came along in 2001 and gave us our first proper web-browsing experience. I joke not. We may hate it now, but when it first arrived it was the browser or browsers. There was just nothing to compete with it. Because of this we embraced it with both arms and in some cases are even now struggling to let go (Come on United Kingdom, just 1.8% left to go). The problem is, because we all decided the IE6 was the "one true browser", over 80% of us used it and it the lack of competition meant that we were still using it in our masses five years after it was released. If things had continued without competition, we would still be using it. Microsoft wouldn't have needed to up their game if we all still used it. As it happens, other browsers came along with some new-fangled ideas and the competition created a breeding ground for innovation. Tabbed browsing. Super-fast JavaScript engines. Developer tools. Smaller tool-bars. Integrated search. Native support for audio and video. The list is endless, but we would have seen none of this without a bit of competition. I'm not anti-Microsoft - Internet Explorer 10 is fantastic, but only because it has to be good to remain a viable option in a nicely crowded marketplace.

If we want to just be happy with what we've got, we'd all be taking photographs that look like this... the earliest surviving photograph, taken in 1826 and featuring a... erm?! Bloke working at a tilted desk maybe although apparently this is a view from a window.

So here is the bottom line. So what if I created another option on top of what already exists. I don't even claim that my option is better than the existing options, but it's different. It has a smaller footprint, is easy to install and has a very accessible learning curve. I'm not forcing it on people, I have just made it available for anyone who wants it. People can choose to use whichever incarnation they choose - but what they don't have a right to do is attempt to stifle competition, because that is what stifles innovation.