Competition is important.

It teaches us how much we can improve to potentially best them. It is an instructive motivating force also driven by the nature of business. Everybody wants the best thing they can get, for the least amount of resources to get it, from any source they can get it from. It might sound trite to put it this way but it feels very relevant after experiencing the losing end of this sort of thing. Maybe it is that, only in loss, can we really understand the important lessons like this. Certainly we had the thought about its apparent truth before having gone through it, however, having a thought and knowing its validity really are two different things. Knowledge tends to present itself without any help once you have it in your head. It doesn't hint or nag... it simply IS.