Competition

It’s honestly lovely to work on a product with no real competition in sight.

When I interned at Mozilla one year, Firefox was unequivocally the best web browser around. It was the darling of open source. Not only that, but everyone was doing everything on the web then. And when I told people what I worked on, I got exclamations of respect and gratitude that felt pretty damn good.

Just months later, big Google launched Chrome. After a couple years the response to what I worked on became “Oh, sorry…I use Chrome” (yes, this was the most common response after asking what I do for work — I will never understand this, like “oh you do sales at Staples? Sorry…I shop at Office Depot”!)

But competition is inevitable if you’re working on something valuable, and a good sign of that fact.

Now, how to deal?