Never Criticize Your Competitors
loiclemeur.com
loiclemeur.com
2. This is helpful in the sense that criticism isn't necessarily the best way to compete, especially if you're growing a new market.
3. Sometimes it's good to ignore your competition, sometimes it's good to partner with them, sometimes it's best to undercut them on price, or best them on features. And sometimes it's best to tell everyone the raw deal they've been getting.
4. Criticizing your competition generally works better in established markets where you're resegmenting.
By the way, I'm a PC guy.
The whole "I'm a PC" response from MS was decent. Unfortunately, they didn't go after the fashion statement base, which are the only Mac users who bother me. They're the ones that could be surfing the same Internet on a PC for 1/2 the cost.
It's a crafty technique put to good use by Apple's marketing department. Whether it's something a small startup could use to put a dent in a market goliath, I'm not so sure.
If you critize your competition, you basically give them a good handle where to improve themselves. You do not want your competition to improve if you want to make money.
If you have 10% market share you can grow by taking customers from the competition, or by maintaining that percentage while you and competitors help the market to grow and grow. Both are worthwhile strategies, the latter especially so in emerging industries / technologies.
Edit: Alex Rampell, CEO of TrialPay, says this:
don't worry about that. you have to control the market and the market has to be big enough to cause economic damage if it is controlled. VERY hard to make an anti-trust case stick.
"Types of agreements that have been held per se illegal include agreements among competitors to fix prices or output, rig bids, or share or divide markets by allocating customers, suppliers, territories, or lines of commerce. The courts conclusively presume such agreements, once identified, to be illegal, without inquiring into their claimed business purposes, anticompetitive harms, procompetitive benefits, or overall competitive effects."
Obviously small players aren't worth prosecuting but that's a different question.
Collusion is always illegal when it's anti-competitive, whatever the size of the participants of the collusion. The key point to take away though, is that the authorities are unlikely to enforce antitrust laws against minor/negligible market participants. However, as little as 2% combined total market share has been enough to justify enforcement of antitrust laws for collusion.
Unfortunately, the law provides no clear definition, just as there's no clear point at which competitive behavior become "anti-competitive."
I'm not sure I'd agree with the statement that it's "VERY hard to make an anti-trust case stick" -- the antitrust laws are used a lot more than you hear about in the regular news (and the government doesn't have to be the one who brings them since you can be sued under the laws). For instance, in 2003 Nestle and Dreyer's Ice Cream were blocked from merging on antitrust grounds because the government defined the market they would gain a large share in as "The Market for Superpremium Ice Cream" (not the market for desserts or the market for ice cream). Many other deals aren't even attempted for fear of antitrust.
Not only that, but you can be found guilty of price fixing even if you didn't have a conversation about prices.
But if you're big enough for this to be a concern, you're already thinking about hiring Washington lobbyists to protect yourself and not reading Hacker News.
After seeing the tense on this, I guessed that this article must have been written before Amazon bought them. I was right.
I hope the Zappos culture lives on, even though they got bought by Amazon. They've been a great example for aspiring entrepreneurs.