A company that survives long enough eventually gets turned to the dark $ide. Greedy asshats will always ruin a good thing for their own benefit
Any company that becomes publicly traded gets turned to the dark side. That’s the factor that does it because they have a legal requirement to do everything they can to maximize profits.
Trying to sustain perpetual growth will always lead to companies fucking over their customers and employees.
While I feel this is true there are so few privately owned companies that prove this as fact. Holds breath that steam never fucks over its customers
I live Valve, but there’s always that nagging bit in the back of my mind reminding me that they can always turn evil in the span of a few years. And the recent debacle with Dolphin doesn’t help
The biggest problem in my opinion is, when companies stop to be companies and instead turn into glorified money trees whose only purpose is to shake all value from, value generated by the people who have to work there.
Once a company sells its soul to investors, it becomes nothing more than a human in the Matrix: a thing to harvest, to be kept alive until nothing of value remains, then thrown aside and disposed.
Source: I speak from experience, worked at one investor-driven enterprise and one that is listed on exchanges
It’s why I think worker-owned coops should be more common. Research shows that they’re a more resilient business model than hierarchical businesses. I think it’s because they can largely avoid the principle-agent problem, wherein executives and investors act on behalf of the company, but their personal incentives do not necessarily align with the company’s. For example, a CEO has a vested interest in pumping up profitability in the short term, even if it’s by slashing R&D funding and alienating customers long-term, so they can get nice numbers to pad their resumé. Likewise, investors just want their investment back.
With a coop, overall control of the company’s decisions is guided more by the long-term health of the company, as that’s what is best for the workers. It aligns incentives, avoiding the perverse incentives that cause hierarchical businesses to make unsustainable, short-term business decisions.
Being good is good for growth, but investors eventually want that payout.
Google also had, realistically, no competition in the online ads business for most of that time. Microsoft tried so hard but never broke into that market. No other online ad company could even come close to google 2000-2010 in terms of scale, technical chops, etc.
It’s easy to have principals, it’s hard to live up to them. The first real competitor to Google’s online ads dominance was Facebook and has caused Google to completely shit the bed (from practices and policy, they’re obviously doing well money wise)
