What are the Limits of Ethics in Competition?

I’ve just received a call at work from a company from which I’d downloaded some software to take a look at it. I’d forgotten downloading it, and it wasn’t really for anything but my own curiosity… though it’s for a product for which my employer already has the bases covered — we have a company-wide license for one vendor’s version, and we have licenses for a competing product for some specific cases.

The differences are mostly “flavor”-related — the major functionalities are the same for all three vendors (the two we have and the one who called).

I mentioned that I think that I’d been doing some investigating of options when it was time to renew one of the contracts with a vendor we’re already using… and the software (and more importantly, annual support) certainly isn’t cheap. After explaining our situation, the gentleman offered something which stuck in my craw as a bit of an ethics issue…

He said that the next time license/support renewals came around, that we should have them give a competitive bid which will be quite low (which makes sense if you’re trying to win business), but then he added that even if we had no intention of switching, he’d be happy to provide us a lowball quote with which to beat up the other guys — he’d be happy to have his competitor make less money even if we continued to use their product.

While I know that there are lots of “games” played in business, this one left me feeling icky. I think that it’s one thing to play games to save yourself money, playing games to hurt your competition… might just be another.