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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, the market isn't static, but dynamic. You play an iterative game. It turns out that spending more money on spreading the word about your apples has better ROI than spending that money on ensuring you actually have the best apples... And even if you achieve best apples and best marketing, think of just how much money you had to spend on the marketing part. How much better still would your apples be if you didn't have to play the zero-sum game of advertising? How much better everyone's products would be?

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Everything you are saying in this thread is exactly right, in my opinion. And I'm a sales guy! Haha.

Inventing something is a value-added game. If I make us a knife that lets us cut a cactus in the desert for water, and we both survive the day because of that knife, I've added value.

If another guy makes the same knife, and now we have to compete for your attention, distort deal terms and product features to "seem" better than the other knife, etc, then this is not adding value. This is destroying time and money.

Sales is a zero sum game. One company wins, the other company loses. That's ok, but the winner should succeed thanks to price + features (e.g. who makes the better knife), not who "promises" you their knife is "better".

In an ideal world, we all just have a spreadsheet of all the knives available out there, their price, what they're actually built to do, and you just hit buy.

I know this thread is probably dead, but just feel like responding: the factor you’re leaving out is that having multiple people competing to develop the best knife leads to better knifes.

This is old school Econ 101, but I think it’s relevant. Know we have multiple options for knifes. How do we decide the best one? We let people decide for themselves, and price is the signaling mechanism as to where resources should be focused.

So we have a “market mechanism” for discovering quality, thereby making “market” an integral part of the system.

It could be done otherways, and markets have known weaknesses, especially for certain categories of goods.

But for many categories of goods it’s a very powerful system to spur and support innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors. So to call an essential part of a market bases system valueless does not make sense.

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