News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years by WitCanStain on Sunday August 01, 2021 @01:25AM (#28023990)
Do you think worker-owned businesses can mitigate this? After all, one of their pluses is supposed to be that the workers can choose to prioritise things other than profit.
Re:Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years by coeneedell on Sunday August 01, 2021 @03:29AM (#28024496)
Not the parent, but I have a thought on this. While workers would be able to prioritize things other than profit, I don't think they would. From an economics analysis, we're really just redefining profit as benefits to all corporation members instead of to the owners. Imagine a middle manager has to choose between hiring a factory that is cheap but has a bad rights/ecological/legal record and a factory that will be more expensive, but is proverbially clean . At a top owned corporation they have no personal incentive to maximize profits, but if they own part of the company, their own compensation will increase if they take the less ethical option.

Note: I generally think a distributed ownership model for a company leads to better health and production in the long run, but this is probably a case where it's worse. When incentives are distributed, and those incentives are perverse, you just have everyone bearing the pressure to enact unethical business prectices.

Re:Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years by perryizgr8 on Sunday August 01, 2021 @05:29AM (#28025036)
Worker owned business can't even compete. Name one such company that is in the top 5 in any product category.
Re:Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years by johannes1234321 on Sunday August 01, 2021 @05:55AM (#28025131)
This is to a large part due to worker owned business being unable to attract capital. A capital giver wants ownership or at least tcomaprable influence as consequence. At that point they aren't worker-owned anymore.

Generally however I think worker-owned companies are unlikely to take risk but value the workplace of current workers over future workers. (i.e. closing a department in order to build a new market will be delayed)

Re:Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years by jesboat on Sunday August 01, 2021 @09:59AM (#28026271)
Ocean Spray.

Wikipedia describes it as

> Ocean Spray is an American agricultural cooperative of growers of cranberries and grapefruit headquartered in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. It currently has over 700 member growers (in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Florida, British Columbia and other parts of Canada, as well as Chile). The cooperative employs about 2,000 people, with sales of $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2013 and accounts for 70% of North American cranberry production.

Re:Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years by atq2119 on Sunday August 01, 2021 @10:46AM (#28026598)
Apparently Huawei has an interesting ownership structure that may partially approximate this? Unfortunately I never bothered to try to find out in more detail.