You know, philosophically speaking, I'm not sure competition really does help the end user. Is a constant search for something better good? Is life now bad? Do we really need it to be improved? Perhaps the idea that it can be improved -- or even should be -- is itself a negativity creator.

Beyond those questions, some of the tactics and strategies used by competitive companies don't lead to better lives. For example, if VHS had never been in competition with BetaMax, our lives would be better because Betamax is better than VHS. Perhaps if there was less competition, many of the startups that are put out of business every day would survive longer and provide even more better life. Sometimes competition destroys the best alternative.

Little things like that make me wonder about our conviction that competition is better.

Further still, imagine if all the energy spent competing was spent collaborating! Imagine if we all focused on a better life, rather than two separate teams focusing on two separate paths to that better life. Mozilla team + Chrome team could be a better scenario than Mozilla team vs. Chrome team.

So, my point is, It's not really that clear cut that competition makes our lives better. Another example, in many countries around the world with single payer health care systems, the people live longer, have lower infant mortality, and disease than in the U.S. where there is competition for health care provision and insurance.

So I'd like to see some evidence for the claim that competition makes lives better and products better. And, even if they do, does it matter that those products have become better? Does the fact that our lives will be better 10 years from now mean we can't be happy today? Should we not focus on being happy with what we have? If competition weren't the status quo, maybe there would be something existing right now to make our lives better than our lives currently are, but we simply don't know about it. It's not here. It doesn't exist. If it did exist, perhaps our lives would be better, but we only believe they are better because we can compare our lives with this thing existing with our lives when it didn't exist.

Would our lives be better if we could colonize mars? Would we have been able to colonize mars if we had worked with the Russians during the cold war? How much more progress would have been made if we had collaborated? Instead, competition has led to nuclear proliferation -- is that a good thing?

If there were only one browser, my life would be better. I wouldn't have to develop for four... wait, five browsers. I'd be able to spend more time focusing on the features and requirements of the system, rather than IE showing a div a little higher or than Firefox. Or Chrome throwing an error on an Ajax call. Or adding IF statements to handle key presses.

Take it to the logical extreme. What if there were 20 browsers each with 5% market share? Would life be even better still?