I have always been a competitive person. I like to play to win. I'm the kind of guy who won't let kids win at sports. It is something driven into me. It's genetic. In my quest as an entrepreneur I have often wondered who I was competing against. I had resigned to a wimpy philosophy that I was competing against myself but I now have decided after a series of recent observations that I am competing against the Allaire brothers. When Ron and I created VirtuFlex, a web scripting language for building dynamic web pages our primary competition with a product called Cold Fusion. It was made by none other than the Allaire brothers. It totally wiped us out and left us searching for a new product to build that ultimately turned into the seeds of ChannelWave while the Allaire folks cleaned-up by scooping out products like JRun and Homesite into a portfolio of products sold by a public company eventually bought by Macromedia for gazillions of dollars. At least I think they made about 30-40 million dollars. Now I am back in the mix on some projects like Viapoint, which is in many ways competing with OnFolio as an organizer for desktop content. Guess who makes OnFolio? You got it. Those pesky Allaire brothers. I must admit that they are usually first to make these sorts of products but it doesn't stop me from trying to compete and getting annoyed that they appear to be beating me to the punch everywhere. It's like my life is a big scavenger hunt for good ideas and they get to the key destinations first and steal the clues. This came to light even more so now because I was researching doing a project relating to retailing streaming video on the Internet and who pops up when we start talking to folks around town. None other than the Allaires again. They are working on a similar project. It would be possible to pass barbs (probably in one direction only) at my nemesis given that JJ Allaire was publishing content online in his own blog but it appears to have stopped in September about when I started writing in mine. Unfortunately we can't effectively conspire against each other using Nemester since that site seems to be in perpetual beta. Maybe those Allaire brothers created a way to scan my brain through psychotronic rays. One step I will take to defeat those evil robots is to get an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie. That ought to keep me safe for now.

"Damn you JJ Allaire you've scooped me again! I'll beat you to the punch some day!"