However, I still don’t buy that economic actors are driven primarily by a desire to gain a leg up on competitors, much less that they are never “motivated by anything other than gaining a competitive edge.” I don’t disagree that companies try to shape the market primarily to benefit themselves, but I believe that they are often more concerned with absolute gains than relative gains. This can be seen especially with producers of highly fungible products, like pork/cotton/milk, who will spend far more money trying to increase national demand than trying to wrestle market share away from other pork/cotton/milk producers.

Economic actors’ incentives and motivations are complex, and it’d be oversimplifying to distill it all down to “they just want to gain an advantage over their competitors.” Even if it were true, there’s still value in studying proximate causes when analyzing strategy.

And don’t get me wrong – I’ve been reading you for a while; I respect you and don’t mean to draw attention away from your main point of attacking a competitor’s strategy. I just wanted to challenge a few minor views I disagreed with, even if I think your conclusions are good.

What you’re implying is ridiculous. You look at it like this: What did Gandhi want at the deepest, most basic level? Was it “non-violence” or was it “getting the British out of India”? And then you see which one was the end and which one was the means. Means are flexible (and so is the rhetoric that justifies them) and ends are not.

“Do you think Gandhi would have used passive resistance if military force would have been the better option?”

Gandhi’s writings show that the question you just posed (at least in the terms you present it in here) could not and would not have even occurred to the guy. “Military force” could not be a better option by its very definition:

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

Yes, his philosophy in a sense did “reformulate the field of battle to his advantage.” But it wasn’t motivated by a desire to “gain a competitive edge,” that gain was secondary and not the incentive.

Secondly, no one, especially in business, is ever motivated by anything other than gaining a competitive edge. Why do you think Google, Facebook and Yahoo opened up their API’s and created value? For fun? Because the value made them feel good inside? No, Google did it with Maps because it undermines the strategy of MapQuest. FB did it because it undermined Myspace. If being closed was more advantageous, they would have continued to do it. Do you think Gandhi would have used passive resistance if military force would have been the better option?

Also, I don’t know that Merck’s motivations were entirely to gain a competitive edge. They just correctly assessed that all drug companies would benefit from the greater efficiency of an open system. There really isn’t a loser in this deal, but there isn’t necessarily an incentive to be the first one to open their research.

It’s like when Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, etc. publish their APIs and all their sites interact with each other fairly seamlessly, adding value for everyone. It takes balls to be the first company to say “yeah you can access the content we’re hosting with our resources without visiting our site, but I really hope you guys do the same for us,” but the end result is positive for the consumer and the corporations.

Of course, this is just another place where the business/war analogy breaks down, because I believe business interactions usually positive sum, and wars are usually negative sum (or zero-sum at best).