The Art of Competing Without Competing

All the tech buzz this week has been around the latest release of Apple's operating system: Mac OS X Leopard. However, in the previous release (Tiger), a new technology called Core Image was introduced, which is only now starting to bear fruit. Using Core Image, at least three low-cost image manipulation programs have sprung up, namely Pixelmator, Acorn and DrawIt.

Core Image does a lot of image manipulation heavy lifting that has previously only been associated with applications like Adobe Photoshop. Presumably if Apple wanted to compete in this space they could have released an application, but instead they chose to do something far more clever.

By taking the hard parts of graphics programming and wrapping it up into an easy-to-use library Apple is playing a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy against Adobe. Now any reasonably talented Mac developer can come a long and lay down some low-end disruption on Photoshop Elements. And Apple can always claim: "Hey - we're not competing against you!"

This is a platform play. Platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X, Facebook) enable application developers to do cool stuff without having to roll everything on their own. As the platform developer, the third party application developers add value to the platform, locking the end users into it. The application developers benefit, but the platform developer benefits a lot.