News and thoughts from the people at EllisLab.

On Competition

Posted by Rick Ellis on March 14, 2008

It’s ironic that we treat our business competitors as adversaries, yet we have more in common with them then differences.  They experience many of the same challenges we do, they work with the same tools, they create products that serve the same market, and their customers are much the same as ours.  If we didn’t view them as opponents, but rather embraced them as people who love the same things we do, we would have a basis for a great friendship.  That’ll never happen, of course, business being what it is.

I think competition is in our DNA.  From the time the first caveman challenged his buddy to outrun the Tyrannosaurus humans have been driven to beat each other.  Nearly every society has valued competition and idolized the victor, so it’s a natural impulse in business today.

Users get caught up in it too.  This seems particularly true of bloggers, who love to root for the publishing app they use, and against the rest.  Users seem to take joy in any bad news that affects the “bad” software, and take glee in the success of the “good” software.  They forget, it seems, that companies are really just groups of humans with dreams and aspirations.

I’m pretty competitive by nature, so I’m certainly guilty of this too.  But I do think that it’s possible to win without someone necessarily losing.  The market for our products is big enough for lots of success stories.  Plus, choices are good for everyone, as users have more to pick from and companies are pushed to innovate.

When I first started developing pMachine Pro back in 2001 there were only two personal publishing tools on the market.  Blogger, who invented the genre, and GreyMatter, written by the enigmatic and brilliant Noah Grey.  When I finally released pMachine Pro in January of 2002 it was within a few months of the emergence of Movable Type and b2 (which would become WordPress years later). 

Those three tools (pMachine, MT, and b2) are what I consider 2nd generation blogging tools, with a direct linage to the first two.  We didn’t invent the genre, but we got into the fray well before most people had ever heard of blogging, and early enough that we became relevant and successful.

Today, ExpressionEngine (the successor to pMachine) is more a content management system then a blogging tool, but it’s roots, operational paradigm, and success can be traced back to blogging.  I like to think of ExpressionEngine as a blogging tool that grew up.

These days I don’t view the other products I mentioned as direct competitors due to the evolution and trajectory of ExpressionEngine, but I used to view them as such, particularly in the early pMachine days.  In fact, during my first few years in business, I saw them as true adversaries, to be reviled and do battle against.  Today, thankfully, I feel much more nostalgia then animus, particularly since it’s those other tools that pushed me to work harder and be more innovative.

Now there are dozens, hundreds, actually, of publishing tools.  It’s a thick field, rife with competition.  All of us, however, are part of a communication revolution that has changed the world.  Personally, I feel proud that I was part of the early wave of tools that literally changed how we build websites today.

I’m too pragmatic to believe that those of us in the publishing software field will become chummy beer buddies, but we do have a heck of a lot more in common with each other then we do differences.  Collectively we’ve achieved remarkable things.  There is a lot to celebrate there.