As you might know, the most popular of our Joomla extensions is  the Template Chooser. For the people who don't know this Joomla module: with this module your visitors can change the template in the front-end.  A few months ago I've noticed there was a new extension in the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) called Template Changer. This new extension did exactly the same what our Template Chooser was already doing for quit some time. In an earlier post, I've mentioned already that I think this is one of the major problems of the JED: too many extensions are doing the same thing, which makes it hard for the users to find the right extension. I verified this new module wasn't just a copy of our module, but this wasn't the case. The code was quit different. But I was really not amused with this. The problem I have with these kind of modules is that they are not created for the benefit of the users, as they only copy functionality that already exists. The authors of these kind of Joomla extensions are creating this to get traffic to their site.

The Template Changer module had however a feature that our Template Chooser was still missing: the possibility to store the template choice in a cookie. This was a feature which was requested by a few people and which we announced to add in a next release. But for some reason we postponed this for a while. So now it was time to be mad at ourselves. This new module had better features then ours, just because we have been too lazy. We immediately created a release of the Template Chooser that contained this feature. This event changed the way we were working. Before ,we often postponed adding new features to our Joomla extensions. Other things seemed more urgent and we could postpone it as there was little or no competition our users could run to. We realized that we could no longer affort to do this. If we get a feature request which is feasible and might be interesting for other users, we will often add it to our extensions in a short time frame. We think this is the best way to stay ahead of competition. Meanwhile, this Template Changer module seems to have disappeared somehow, but this will not stop us from continuing on our improved way of working.

So indeed, competition really is a good thing. It improved our way of working and it are the end-users who benefit from this. So don't be mad if a competitor 'steals' your idea, just try to beat them in qaulity and service.