Has Microsoft become altruistic or is cooperation simply better than competition?

The market economy prides itself on its competitive nature. Through competition we’re promised better and cheaper products and services. I believe this to be true in countless cases. I also believe that we need to be better at considering both the benefits and the inefficiencies that the competitive model brings. As with any dogma it can do just as much harm as good unless constantly being evaluated from a case-to-case perspective.

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Consider for example what companies do to protect their investments in research and development. Companies are constantly suing each other over patents and spending billions on lobbying to make IP-laws stricter and more far-reaching. We buy this concept because we believe competition is more effective than cooperation. It’s been this way for so long that it’s hard to even imagine the alternative. Who knows what kind of cars we would have if all the car manufactures cooperated in their RnD. Maybe we would all have been driving the Tesla Model S ten years ago, maybe we would still be stuck in a Trabant, who knows?

Given this blog post being on a software development firm’s blog you’ve probably already figured out where this is going. Open Source is a large-scale, unconditional, more or less all-in choice of cooperation before competition, and it works! 59% of all web sites run on open source web servers. 95% of smart phones run on open source technology. 82% of users access the Internet using a web browser built on an open source foundation. With Microsoft’s recent release of the .NET framework as open source pretty much all major programming environments are now open source.

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In my experience open source projects tend to be numerous and diverse, allowing the user to choose a project that suits their needs. Often times they have large and helpful communities, answering questions in time zones all around the globe. Open source products are often free, and thus available to more users. Simply giving more people access to others’ creations can spawn innovation that would be lost in a closed environment.

As a software consultant I know that trust is key. When there is lack of trust there is legal overhead, misinformation and static control structures that prevent agility. These projects tend to be more expensive and deliver inferior results. Open source requires a whole bunch of trust. Put yourself in Microsoft’s shoes. Would you find it easy to “give away” technology that you’ve spent billions developing? You’d need to put your trust in people you’ve never met, hoping you will get back as much as you’ve given.

Open source in the software industry might be the most obvious example of trusting others to do something great(er) together. But in fact our entire civilization requires us to trust in each other. Without trust currency would be hugely inconvenient, e-commerce would be impossible and we would have no taxes to pay for services such as law, defense and education.

I don’t believe every sector would benefit from unconditional cooperation but I’m certain that there are vast possibilities to create better, cheaper, fairer, and safer products and services if we start trusting each other more!

Which sectors do you think would benefit from replacing competition with cooperation? How can the software industry benefit from even more cooperation? Or have we gone too far? Use the comment section below!