No, it isn't. Anyone who has been involved in corporate decision making knows that different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome - or even of a barely functional one.

Companies make stupid mistakes all the time. When you're in the trenches there's a certain amount of group think, and issues that may be obvious to outsiders may be invisible and/or suppressed by internal politics.

Of course Internet comments may be naive and wrong for other reasons. But that's a different question.

> different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome

Of course it is no guarantee for success. But an outsider has absolutely no clue about what was discussed and what the politics were. So I think it is naive to make comments like "this is never going to work", or "removing the headphone jack will bring Apple down".

To take a recent example: when a company like TripleByte launches a new product - namely that key parts of all profiles will suddenly be public - they might have thought about this with different teams for a long time too, but commenters on the internet said they were wrong and eventually they admitted that they made a stupid mistake.

Netflix's plan paid off. TripleByte's didn't.

Apples and Oranges, I know, but how do you tell the two apart without hindsight?

It's easy to tell them apart because ethical and instrumental reasoning have distinct value systems.

It is irrelevant that Triplebyte's public profiles may have been instrumentally valuable for the company in the long run. No one arguing against them cared about that. But they did care about the ethical implications of that decision -- it was wrong even if it turned out to be good for Triplebyte, which it didn't because their plan was so brazenly unethical that they got a spanking.