Competitors and You

The more you think about your competitors, the more you become like them.And that’s how you lose sight of your innovative edge and become just another player in the market.

I’ve seen this happen to a lot of companies and their founders.Being aware of your competition is good and may help you in strengthening your strategy to remain competitive in the market.But what often happens in the real world is that a founder gets obsessed with each and every move of its competitor and wants to counter those moves with the same products,services or features.They end up becoming very much alike in what they do and that leads to degradation of the original vision with which a firm was started in the first place.Instead of creating new markets or opportunities they eat each other’s profits and fail to become the market leader in their industry.

I’ve been observing how the visual search and image recognition market, which itself is very nascent, is attracting new players who are all doing more or less the same thing apart from a couple of exceptions who are truly trying to solve this long due problem with the best possible techniques in AI, Big Data and Human Computer Interaction.It’d be interesting to see who keeps innovating in this space, cracks the major use cases that are aligned with the real world needs of end users and become the dominant player over the next few years.