Bertil

You still pay it at international prices, that are set by events in the Golf.

You seem to have forgot one point: the trillions spent in the Middle-East are to protect the supply of cheap Oil — so step 0. is: Sell your car, insulate your house.

Why is this text the first one from Anonymous et al. that doesn't move me, at all? They sound odd, using a “we” to include all ‘digital natives’ while I never heard anyone under 25 use “we” before; they mention (two girlfriend's) faces on MSN, but I never heard of a webcam on MSN; I never heard of anyone actually enjoying a show call it “we want our shot of entertainment”.

The most common explanation given to economic students is theoretical and relevant to basic rationality: * investors who are speculative have no interest to become long-term focused, while * a long-term focused investor who, say, owns a great but over-priced stock has interest in selling it expecting to buy it back afterwards, and then bring it to its long-term value; * similarly, a long-term investor who sees two company would rationally prefer a average but underpriced stock over a great, but already high one if he expects a higher value. Because short term always precedes long, considering speculation is rational for either type of investor.

You can check chapter 10 and 11 of Keynes' General Theory… if you want a very detailed personal account of those.(Keynes was the best speculator of his time, and make Cambridge King's College immensely rich doing so.)

It actually depends a lot on the type of service that you are considering: will that competitor make your life easier or worst?

A simple example: my brother sells pearls. He considers other pearl sellers as competitors, but actually the more people see pearls being worn, then more they'll assume it is a legitimate jewel — so diamond sellers are his real competitors, and other non-stone gems should help legitimize his business. Therefore, when he can't accomodate a prospect (say, he doesn't have the right color) he should advertize for other pearl providers.

Another similar tech example: e-mail; the more companies used e-mails, the more IMAP became a useful protocol. The complete opposite would be ERPs: it's much easier to share the same ERP as your customer & provider. Therefore, if you are a competitor of SAP (the ERP for BigCorp) trying to specialize towards SMB, you spend a lot of commercial effort to explain the benefits of ERP in general to small businesses, only to pave the way for them switch to SAP——because that's what their customer use, and those are too big to change.

That why you have many e-mail providers, several cell phone makers, but only one dominant search-engine, one dominant ERP provider, one dominant social network, etc. To tell the difference is hard —— for instance, encouraging open standards might help your customer to switch to the leader more than it would help you offer a compatible service.

I'd love to help you (all that is what my PhD is about ;) but I'd need more detail about your specific industry.