Coopetition, anyone? While Amazon may have won a high profile
court battle against IBM regarding cloud services for the government, Amazon still
supports many of IBM's platform technologies. With the increasing overlap of partners playing in each other's layer of the stack while still maintaining a partnership, one has to wonder: will companies eventually breakaway from their partners in an effort to dominate more stack layers, or will we see more collaboration among historic competitors?
Glass half-full, I would suggest the latter. According to game theory in economics, if competitors work together, they can optimize the value of the market as a whole. Even though rivals won't see as big of a slice of the pie if they crush their competitor, companies as innovative and intelligent as Amazon and IBM must realize that collaboration is mutually beneficial and grows the market regardless of the occasional heated conflict.
What do you think? Thoughts, comments, rebuttals?
Amazon and IBM have so many lawyers that they need to give them something to work on. I wonder if in other areas of the business, IBM and Amazon are collaborating in peace. For example, if you only listen or read the news headlines you would thing that Apple and Samsung hate each other and were always battling. They might hate each other, but they are also partners. Apple bought $10billion worth of components from Samsung in 2012.
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