Imaginary competition and surprise innovation

Last week I warned about the dangers of copying only what you see, because your competitor typically has a bunch of stuff going on in the back end that can mean all the difference in the world when it comes to business profits.

But what if, to quote Will Smith, the things you think you saw you did not see? What if your insights into the hidden aspects of a competitor are wrong? Can “imaginary competition” help you or hurt you?

There’s a story that’s been going around in my head for almost 20 years now from Michael Abrash, who was (and probably still is) a big name in the computer graphics field.  I can’t find a direct quote on this (I think I read it in an old issue of Dr. Dobbs) but this link sums up the story:

In the book “The Zen of Graphics”, Mike Abrash tells of how he worked with a guy who developed PC video card hardware. This was still comparatively early days, with no 3D and only a small amount of hardware acceleration. This guy had gone as far as he thought he could with the transistor count available to him on the custom silicon, but one day he heard that their competitor had added a command buffer. Now, our hero thought about what this meant, and he knew it had the possibility to free the CPU up from a wait loop, and had the potential to be a product killer, making his product look slow and outdated even before it had shipped. He knew he couldn’t compete with that, he had only a couple of dozen gates spare at most, but he put in a very crude double register, which would help, but he was afraid that his competitor’s hardware was going to absolutely murder them. As it turned out, the competitor’s product was nothing of the sort, and our hero’s product was vastly superior. All because he believed that someone else had done a better job with the same resources that he had.

There’s a bit of a “can you… work harder?” lesson in there, maybe, but I think the key takeaway is that companies need more paranoid warriors on staff. Paranoid to imagine crazy capabilities in your imaginary competition’s lineup, and warriors to refuse to lay down and die in response.