Competition fuels innovation. Look at Mazda Wankel Engines, amazing little powerhouses that fizzled out because all technologies had to come from inhouse as no one else wanted to build their own versions.
The same is similar with Intel in the late 80's/early 90's, you had AMD, Cyrix, VIA, and others making their own versions and tweaks. Hell, even AMD gave Intel the RISC based performance tweaks with their K6 line. Will all of this the lowly little consumer x86 beat out the newer stronger POWER series and them came up and started eatingninto the high-performance markets.
All this stuff facinates me but I am just glad I can arbitrarily argue with my best friends about why I think Coke, Mazda, Android, and PS4 are better than Pepsi, Ford, iOS and Xbone as all of those things wouldnt exist without the other. ... (Maybe coke would, it's liquid crack to a lot of americans lol)