From Consumerium development wiki R&D Wiki
- outsourcing to the competetor to keep up demand
- Huh. What's this up there. I don't simply understand why a company would want to outsource to a competitor and how would that keep up demand --Juxo 15:40, 28 Aug 2004 (EEST)
- If you have a small group of people working in Python you don't want any of them to go out of business. Instead you want them to develop specialties so that you can pick the most fun or most profitable and know for sure that you can get others to solve the boring and unprofitable parts of the problem. If you never outsource to competitors to create a value chain, with you pulling on the money side of it as the customer's most direct contact, this won't happen. If there is no demand (from you) for them to serve, you will not take on the high-profile front-end delivery-to-the-customer design-intensive jobs, the prime contractor positions. Which are the most profitable since they are the most direct channel to the customer. Does that help?
- Ok. I understand but I still think that applies to niche markets and one shouldn't do outsourcing in lateral manner but vertical. I understand this so that competitors are lateral to your company as sub-contractors are vertical with the end-customer as the "highest" on the map. --Juxo 18:57, 28 Aug 2004 (EEST)
- If you are trying to develop a commodity market in some specific type of widget you must do some lateral outsourcing simply to establish extreme standards for interchange. So if you are always short of bolts because you are just not interested in bolt-making, you must invent the idea of a #2 bolt and a #3 bolt and a #4 bolt and get a bunch of other people making them, even if you also make bolts sometimes. Else you just never get any standards since there is no incentive to make one maker's bolt fit the other maker's nut, right?
- Didn't this all get started with guns?