Mastodawn

@anon_opin Privatisation does prompt a little bit of competition in areas where there was none but should have been some, and this competition does cause otherwise slow and expensive and primitive offerings from organisations who would rather sit on their arses reaping the rewards with little effort into having to offer a better product at better prices by developing improved processes and supply chains.

Otherwise it’d be like soviet-era days of just providing a quota, most product out of the door wouldn’t even work because of poor manufacture, nonexistent testing, and drunkenness on Fridays. Contrast that with the competition involved in flash memory cards, if it weren’t for competitive process improvements we’d still be limited to 16MB cards at two hundred quid each.

However, competition isn’t an on-off switch, unlike the perceptions of most politicians and some past prime ministers. There’s a small area, a tiny band, a little portion of the curve, where underneath this things definitely could be improved because there’s no competition and the suppliers know this. Competition could kill a startup simply because there’s actual competition, which is unsurvivable - if there wasn’t competition, they’d have a chance of getting on their feet and coming up with the next model and the next, by which time they might have something worthwhile for the world.

Once this stage is arrived at, there’s the part of the curve where competition works. All the suppliers of a product or service are trying to ‘one-up’ their competitors across the street, and the state-of-the-art improves considerably, the prices satisfy consumers, the overall design optimises and the style improves. Happy days, if a little hectic and sleepless.

After more and more competition like this, however, the rewards are not there in such abundance, the price race makes the products suffer, the products sourcing switches to the cheapest possible which affects reliability or longevity of the product, the only levers left to adjust are the brand image and the promises conveyed through advertising. Ultimately the manufacturers or suppliers cave in to economic pressure and make redundancies and then get bought out by a faceless bigger organisation, then broken up, the brand name gets sold on as the only valuable part that remains, and so we have 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s brand names on cheap nasty worthless products today with a ‘known’ brand name stuck on them. Competition killed them long ago.

Competition is good – but it’s not linear and it’s not from zero to full of the curve, it’s only valid for a small portion of the curve, which is typically down in the bottom 2nd quartile of it or somewhere like that. Before it and after it, it’s poison.