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Finally: someone has released a competitor product.

Forgive me if I don’t provide a direct link to their product nor their website.  This is competition and I refuse to drive traffic there.  hehe

Competition is good.  For those politically correct people out there, cover your eyes.  Life has winners and life has losers.  Through some kind of Darwinian evolution, the business with the better product and business model survives.

Fortunately my first tour of duty as an engineer involved competitor analysis.

The knee-jerk reaction to seeing a competitor is usually “Why are they doing it like that?  That’s dumb!”  Finding fault in your competitors puts you on the same level as Steve Ballmer and we’ve all seen the results of his philosophy on the Microsoft brand.  Michael Dell is still eating his words about Apple.

If a customer buys a competitor product, there is a reason why they chose that product over yours.  Something about your competitor convinced your potential client to leave you and go to them.  Do you really thinking you’ll find the answer to your question by trashing your competition?

Smart analysis involves finding out what your competitor does and what do they do that’s better.  For my part, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how my competitor could crush me.  By creating this doomsday scheming, I’ve found several avenues for opportunity that I didn’t notice before.  Also several areas of enhancements came to light.

But studying my competition is not the only applications I”m looking at.

This page is gold.  These are the top applications available for the iPhone.  Measuring my product against the best applications available.  Take the bits and pieces which incorporate customer requests and see how others are doing it.  Take those ideas, incorporate my brand around it, and push out another update.

It’s all about competition.  And who benefits from this Darwin competition?

The customer.