What happens when there is no collaboration: no good recipes

A couple of days ago, Google launched a nice recipe search engine where you can search for specific ingredients and get a selection of recipes. This product is very similar to the recipe engine developed by Ask.com three years ago as a result of a collaboration of three offices Pisa, in Europe, Piscataway in New Jersey and Oakland in California.

Unfortunately the first recipe engine suffered a lot of internal fights among different groups aiming at getting the ownership of the product. As a consequence, the quality of the product suffered because the original team was fed up about the political implications of those fights. That was a good lesson learned for the future and something I wanted to share with the readers of this blog.

Competition is outside and it is huge. So tell me: why there are inside fights? Don't get me wrong, competition is always good provided that the rules are fair and that the judges are not part of the competition. Otherwise it becomes just destructive.