If you have ever seen a blind cave fish, one thing you cannot help to notice is that it looks like a typical fish except that it has no eyes.  It doesn’t have small eyes; it has no eyes at all.  If there was ever such a thing as a committee deciding how to configure a fish for a cave, imagine the debate and decision that would have been necessary for all parties to agree to give up something as intuitively essential as eyes.  Granted, the blind cave fish lives where it is perpetually dark, and so doesn’t need eyes that require light to operate, but then what if it ever did?  Wouldn’t it be a shame to find some partially lit part of a cave and not have the capacity to take advantage of that?

The problem with that logic, of course, is the cost, and in the hyper-competitive environment of the natural world, any excess born that a competitor does not bear can wipe out an entire species.  The same is true in business where just a little higher overhead than a competitor can cause an entire business to fail.  Any money spent on keeping IP that you are not or should not use is money that might have been spent creating IP you can use or exploiting the IP that does make sense for your business.  The blind cave fish has a very simple solution to that partially lit part of a cave.  It tends not to go there.  For a blind cave fish, the world of light is a dangerous place to be.  In the world of the dark, the blind cave fish is king.

Image credit: JohnsonDJ