During my office furniture years I regularly bought competitive products and "deconstructed" them to know what was inside. I had to be inventive in how I bought and shipped those products, since once found out the competitors acquired an attitude
In one of my more embarrassing escapades, I was wondering around a competitors show room in Chicago when one of their sales people came in who had formally worked at the company I worked for. Momentarily the manager showed up and I was politely asked to leave----now!
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis