Why is competition bad?

There is a certain level of anti-capitalism among many of the bloggers I read who cover Web 2.0 issues. The two common themes are offense taken at companies that plan on being acquired eventually, and concern over competitors who copy features from market leaders. An amusing example of the latter is Michael Arrington's post on 23, the new photo storage site that is being attacked as too much like Flickr. First he complains about the similarities: "23 is a lot like flickr. Almost a clone, even down to the UI and feature comparisons." Then he complains about a Flickr feature not found in 23: "The things I like best about Flickr right now are the "sets" (23 calls them albums) and the uploader tool which takes the pain out of uploading many pictures at once. 23 needs a similar tool."

I agree that copying a UI is wrong, unless it is too dependent on the actual function, but clearly copying feature sets from the market leader is how software grows. Total innovation is often hard and unneccesary. For example, I've been using Del.icio.us for a few weeks now, and even though I like the idea a lot, there are serious performance and reliability problems. They seem like web server load issues, so I hope Joshua can handle scaling. That is the major issue I tried to explore with him when I saw him at Harvard. I would be glad to try another service that gave me pretty much the same features, but was more reliable. Delicious is hardly a brilliant advance in UI, so if a competitor looked largely the same I woudn't gripe, especially this early in the product cycle.

I guess it is a matter of degree and initial outlook. I see producing a clone as a valuable and long-held practice in software, but simply making a weak clone will certainly fail. The whole point of a clone is that it is forced to exceed the original, or current leader, in the area of performance and customer service. That sort of competition serves the users and the developers best.