So for months I’ve had a post in my head about what I call ‘benign competition’, the kind of thing when you work at a company which is in competition with other companies over who can make users lives better faster. It’s more sport than cut-throat competition; it’s the kind of thing where after the game is done and everyone’s taken showers you’re cool going out for beers with the other team. As this post has been brewing in my head it’s taken on a life of its own, evolving from a set of notes to an outline for what could be, if not a book, at least something far longer than a blog post.

Blogging plays a big part in this. How the troops on opposite sides treat each other tells a lot about how the greater machines think and act. Having worked at both Yahoo and Google, I have a good perspective on this, and I can list dozens of bloggers on both sides that bear witness to the same mentality, Jeremy Zawodny being a great example, especially when talking about the relationship between personal blogging and the ‘mother Y’. I’m sure that it’s largely because of my optimistic (myopic?) state that this post by Jeffrey McManus caught me pretty off guard. It’s always good to remember that just because a guy will get drunk with you after the game doesn’t mean he won’t clock you across the jaw when the ref isn’t looking. Name-calling is bad enough, but the guy’s a director. Sheesh.