In asymmetric competition, the players are facing each other, but are obeying to different logics. Think about the American
Army facing the Jihadi insurgents. One is a hierarchy, the other a network of bands. It is difficult for the Jihadi’s to win militarily, but they can wear out their enemy, because they have a different logic of operation, and do not have to maintain a large standing army.

I have regularly argued that peer production, as in Linux and Wikipedia, where communities largely drive development, aided or not by an ecology of companies, is in a number of cases more competitive than for-profit production (see http://p2pfoundation.net for more on this). The community of volunteers, mostly driven by the most powerful motivator of all, i.e. passionate intrinsic motivation, has only one objective in mind: making the best possible product or service, while the for-profit company only innovates just enough to beat its competition. In the software industry, and this includes the CTO’s of client companies, it is now generally agreed that open source innovates faster than proprietary competitors.

Let us assume that this is indeed so. This gives two possibilities.

In the pure model, a peer project of a for-benefit institution, say Firefox of the Mozilla Foundation, is facing a for-profit software company operating with proprietary code, say Microsoft with Explorer. In the long run, Firefox will win.

But there is also a hybrid formula. Two for-profit companies are competing, but one is either proprietary or closing down an open environment, and the other is fully open. In this scenario, say the closing up of MySpace vs. the opening up of Facebook, it is the player using open, participatory and commons-oriented strategies and tactics that will ultimately win.

This at least is the prediction of asymmetric competition that I’m making.

The company that is betting on the power of social innovation of its community of users/consumers is going to build an insurmountable advantage against competitors holding on to closed strategies.

Here is a case study for those who want to know more. There are now many open source licenses, but an increasing number of hybrid formats which may be masquerading as open licenses. The latter do not really give an advantage to the community of co-developer and seek to maintain the control and dominance of the proprietary entity.

In the following contribution, the author explain why communities will flock to the authentic open models, and leave the inauthentic ones, giving advantages to the authentic open strategies, and resulting in the other ones becoming dead-ends.

For more, see this blog entry on Freedom Zero, at
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0