Now, I am in no liberty to answer this, so I will paraphrase what a local record company owner has said.
"Years ago, I used to watch competitors go down and celebrate. Now, they're dropping like flies, and we all need to fight to stay open"
Now, his situations pretty specific, but I think what he's saying is that without competition, you are left alone and vulnerable.Competition is healthy and necessary, so you shouldn't hate them. You should even help them if they're in trouble.
Well, well. I'm not sure about this. The reason he was sad that his competitors were going away is because it was evidence that his market was collapsing. I'm sure he would have been just fine with it if he was absorbing all the business his competitors had been doing and the overall size of the market was flat or expanding.
In many ways, your competitors are what's standing in the way of your success. You can tell yourself that you are trying to outdo yourself, but I don't think that Tiger Woods' primary motivation on the course is beating his last score. Beating another person is more deeply rooted in the human psyche.
Now, there are really only two paths to growth for a company: grow the market, or take share from your competitors. Even growing the market is normally in some sense taking business from other players in your segment. For example, if you grow a music business some of that is probably going to eat into other forms of entertainment. Witness the rise of the video games industry. And in many cases, the path to expanding the market is unclear or you do not have the skill to execute it, so the only thing left is to take business away from your competitors.
It's possible you could do that while still bearing them personal good-will. But I suspect that the human brain is going to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance in trying to say that on the one hand you like the people but on the other hand you're fine with hurting them or even putting them out of business. This is probably true even with the rationalization that you're doing what's best for the customer (which is not always true).
IMO you have a real problem when your employees stop emotionally disliking your competitors on average. That means that their products are so much better than yours that they overcome the natural distaste for "the enemy" or, even more reptilian, "the man who wants to eat the food that I want to eat." (That's why I think Google doesn't have much hope in the social space, because internally there's very little ill-will towards Facebook or Twitter. Apple is more of a contest.)
