The recent Square vs. Verifone kerfuffle/gymkhana/embroglio/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is, I think, a pretty important one. Not just for itself, but for what it says about the tech industry. (This also happens to be my industry.) There are a number of companies right now trying to muscle and/or bully their rivals out of the marketplace– Twitter is a recent example with their attempt to be the only one offering a Twitter client etc and, of course, there is Apple’s involvement in the eBooks space. (Carly has talked about this a few times already and things are just getting started!)
Frankly it honks me off. If your product/marketing/sales/engineering team are better than the competition I want you to succeed- truly! No matter which particular software horse I happen to be backing I want the best to win! That’s what’s good for competition, and competition is, ultimately, what’s good for us, the poor schmuck consumers. After all, most of the time the more one company pushes another the better the products and/or pricing ends up being.
So I actually like what I’m seeing in this fight where two companies are going at it based on what their products actually do, rather than trying to leverage their market share to force an opponent to simply give up. Really, I like the fact that these two companies are fighting about their products rather than image or patents or he said/she said nonsense. Yes, I like this kind of thing, so I’m going to post ROAM Data’s statement here without comment, because no matter who I’m backing in this fight, I’m glad to see the fight taking place in the technical realm. That’s the realm I live in, and that’s where I want to see these fights won and lost.
Read ROAM Data’s blog post for more information. And you can read more about their encryption method as well.