Their ad and marketing budgets are basically to woo public opinion into belief billionaires should exist, however.

Look at the Coinbase story; employee and investor wealth gone. CEO wealth intact. And society gains little to nothing net new from enriching that fraud.

Billions locked up in deference to a handful of CEOs means less liquidity in the open market. Which is intentional, I understand; if dollar value collapses these guys might have to work to survive, and of course humans could no longer do the necessary trade of real things to stay alive and prosper if an arbitrary financier cannot claim an arbitrary % of economic activity thousands of miles away.

Human agency is coupled to wishful thinking still. Which is understandable; we only just crossed the threshold of <50% of adults believing in higher powers. Was still 80% around 2000.

People being laid off is not lost wealth.

Speculative value is not wealth.

"Billions locked up" requires an explanation. People with money generally invest it in assets or other companies. Who is locking up billions? Why? Is it a meaningful % of the total money supply?

Things have changed since sometime in the 1980s.

That's not the definition of a sociopath.

IBM created the playbook, Microsoft perfected it, FAANG copied it.

The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies.

Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance.

To apply this to another context: I genuinely think that IKEA has had an outsized positive impact on our everyday life, even as they aim to make money (not the core “charity”, but the rest of the group), or as they make truely dirty legal and commercial decisions to trick the system in their favor. And they didn’t improve flatpacks by accident, it is their stated mission, and I’d be crazy proud of my job if I designed the Expedit series.

IKEA has been illegally logging forests in romania for decades.

The first public conpany was involved in slavery. Show me a large enough company and there will be a history of fraud, illegality and human rights abuses.

Also using tainted wood isn't the only thing IKEA has ever done, just as breaking the speed limit or parking illegally isn't he only thing I've ever done. If you were held to a "one strike and you're out" good/evil standard would you really stand up? I know I wouldn't.

There's also a trend to give big companies liability for their supply chains. Germany just enacted a supply chain law last year and there are talks about similar laws for the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act

The specificity of your comment (large enough company) is misleading. The flaws you call out are everywhere, not just large companies.

Humans are imperfect. Human organizations and institutions (companies of all sizes, governments of all types, schools, churches, and so on) are also imperfect.

I don't mean to say that we shouldn't set high goals, devise mechanisms to deal with imperfection and so on (checks and balances, regulations, etc), just that there isn't anything particularly unique about "large companies" in this regard.

As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures.

It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs.

When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1]

I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that.

So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies)

[0] how the table turned, quality wise…

[1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

If your country (cough-cough USA) had already descended into the "crap products globalisation stage" before IKEA came along, it will feel like a net positive.

If your country (cough-cough Sweden) got IKEA before that stage, I would say, yes, IKEA displaced quality furniture.

I'd say the overall problem is un-accounted for externalities. Cheap crap from China or Vietnam is just a symptom of the same illness.

Crappy products are okay, in a free market economy. But crappy products with huge environmental costs undercutting "kosher" crappy products, is not okay.

What use are even labour and environmental laws if one can skirt them by pushing the problem elsewhere?

If you want to go into Ikea and just buy long lasting solid wood products, go ahead! Indeed I'd argue Ikea has made new solid wood furniture more accessible, heck sometimes new Ikea wood furniture is cheaper than consignment store wood furniture!

I've seen (and own) some solid wood furniture from IKEA. I'm usually an IKEA defender (see another post I just made on this thread).

I would not describe their solid wood furniture as "nice". Given the way they tend to assemble even small members from multiple small scraps of wood glued together rather than single pieces, I think calling them "solid" is even a bit of a stretch, at least in some cases. They're also made out of fairly soft wood, usually, and barely finished, if at all.

A bit the same way so many corporations are “carbon neutral” through offset, even if it’s a scam under most of these.

IKEA using it’s position to do something could be a realistic solution, I just don’t know if there is much hope in that regard.

The coffee scene could be a exemple where traceability helps a lot to improve the market (as a consumer there are options to do the right thing for non crazy prices), while the global picture stays grim as the most sold coffee will always be the unmarked super market value pack.

Worker protection: same as for Amazon, I wish they rapidly advance their robotization programs. In the meantime I strongly support more regulation, and would like security and social policies baked into the prices, especially as I don’t think there would be that much actual impact. Just as wish more companies across the board get unions.

If we change the ecosystem, other companies would evolve to be the winners. (Or IKEA and Amazon would change.)

I say that as a sample of the population who deeply wants the bland, blank slate aesthetic in reaction to the rococo and non-modular furniture I had to deal with in other people’s home and surroundings.

Paradoxally, I am sure it will come back as a reaction to people like me, and next gnerations might want to get back to their roots and resurface diverse and culturally more anchored styles. When it does, I hope they’ll have small production tools (home grade cnc mills ?) to do so in small batches at low cost, and get crazy with the stuff they make.

It's usually most or all of: hideous; difficult to assemble (why people complain about IKEA when basically every other player in their market is far worse, I do not understand); worse-made than IKEA furniture; still, somehow, more expensive than the IKEA equivalent.

IKEA's about the best option out there for people who don't have a lot of money and also would rather not furnish their home with cheap antiques from the 1920s (go much newer, or much older, and it starts getting expensive), having to do a lot of DIY re-upholstering in the process if they want anything with cloth on it.

If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?

I assume normal and fallible humans are the ones who are going to setup this new system that will prevent abuse?

Still, we have set up memory safe practices and languages and standards, building standards and regulations, and food safety regulations that work quite well. Just because humans make mistakes and are fallible doesn't mean that humans are incapable of working to prevent mistakes and the consequences of human fallibility.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try, but it isn't really silver bullet.

An employee from a corporation benefits from a corporation that abuses their power. Ordinary citizens that vote for a corrupt politician do not, and have no invested interest in them.

I probably wasn't as clear as I should have been.

It's less about matter of eliminating abuse, and more about damage reduction. We can have systems that even if someone screws up, the consequences are not catastrophic.

The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.

The structure is so deliberately conceived that I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept the same functioning even as a public entity. They’d make less money, but would probably still concentrate decision power into a few chosen hands and lock the whole from external influence.

Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti competitive practices and deals with authoritarian governments.

Tbh I think claiming that it’s an extremist opinion when there’s an entire century+ old political school of thought that views the entirety of capitalism as amoral, is either putting your head in the sand at the thought, or an equally extremist opinion on the good of companies

If something nearly half the world followed is considered a extremist then I do not believe the word has any meaning left

It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". The Corporation gives everyone a moral shield that lets them rationalize all the shit that happens, but the money that pays their salary and the stock options they get all come from the same source.

See Better Off Ted for a great look at this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted

Aren't they in fine the same thing?

If you believe that the logical consequence of a system is the emergence of amourphous amoral entities harming the greater good, aren't you actually fundamentaly against said system? I kind of get the opposite take-away from your line of thoughts: I believe that a lot of people who think of themselves as capitalist but actively distrust corporations are actually latent anti-capitalist.

You can have a market-oriented economy on small scales, and we can have independent professionals competing to see who provides the best services at the lowest prices, and we can use money and capital as the means of production just fine. The problem is when we take a system in one scale and think "bigger is better". This is when we get "amorphous amoral entities harming the greater good".

Mind you, if you think about it this also applies to other socio-political systems. Communism, per se, is not a problem. If the general idea of "communism" was just a bunch of hippies living however they wanted, there wouldn't be so much reason to be against it.

The problem is when you have people going full Trostky and actively work to make it a Global-scale system, effectively turning the State into an "amorphous amoral entity harming the greater good"

Once you deal with all edge cases. You end up with an OSS license.

I still recall people fawning over how Google was going to be "different" in 2006, and how it was going to save us from Microsoft. Nowadays, they are essentially what MS was in its' heyday. Blind faith in corporations is not the way forward.

I've always understood the hacker ethos to have strong tenets of working towards decentralized power structures through tech. Nowadays, that idea feels farther away even on a site like this one.

This is, first and foremost, about the business, not the people or the technology.

The further corporatisation of OSS through lobbying organizations like the CNCF is a sad state of affairs. But it is also the place where VCs are putting a lot of their money. That and until 2 weeks ago, Web3

Directors do not have a legal responsibility to boost their shareprice.

Companies do not have a single goal.

Public companies are not obliged to increase their share price.

Every company is different.

I'd also add that on top of all that, different countries have different corporate law.

And law indeed differs... But everywhere someone will be made responsible for not getting the best for their buck (the simplest case: being fired).

That applies to FAANGMxyz and also the rest of the top 500 shareholder companies.

(https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/15/oil-shell-directors-sued-for..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/timabansal/2021/05/27/big-oil-u...)

It will be a lot harder to argue that developing a closed-source component is, in the long run, bad for Microsoft, though.

That's an often-repeated maxim, but it's not universally agreed to be true.

Quoting https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/24/stakeholder-gover... for example:

"The fiduciary duty of the board is to promote the value of the corporation. In fulfilling that duty, directors must exercise their business judgment in considering and reconciling the interests of various stakeholders—including shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the environment and communities—and the attendant risks and opportunities for the corporation.

Indeed, the board’s ability to consider other stakeholder interests is not only uncontroversial—it is a matter of basic common sense and a fundamental component of both risk management and strategic planning."

I read this Harvard text to basically say: "Don't cheat if the cheating will be coming to bite you later. Be generous if you expect additional profits to come from this generosity."

> Be generous if you expect additional <reward> to come from this generosity.

Options for reward could include (without being limited to): "profit", "platform adoption", "trust".. and those rewards often affect each other over time.

Google for something like "obligation to maximize shareholder value" if you want to find numerous articles debunking the myth. Here's a good one [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Maximizing shareholder value is a management philosophy that became increasingly prevalent between 1975 and 2000. In both management ("What we should value and pursue") and case law ("What you will be sued and found guilty for not doing").

Why did it become popular? Because there were a huge number of inefficient companies at the time that were continuing business as usual under some guise of "We think this is best." While Japanese companies ate their lunches by working harder, faster, better, and smarter.

Holding management to shareholder value -- and sueing the heck out of them when they didn't focus on it -- was a more objective measurement of effectiveness.

After 2000, it became clear that the metric had become the target, and was now being pursued with a myopicness that was to the detriment of the company.

There are few absolutes in "high performance"

But nobody said they need to break the law, or hurt employees. Given the constraints of the law, they have a single mission of maximizing the share price. Which is exactly what Microsoft and other companies do every day. If the environment gets in the way of your business (i.e if you are an oil company) then you will only care about the environment to the extent that you are legally obligated to.

There are dissenting papers [2] mostly revolving upon Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, but there are many intractable problems when you assert such primacy. Over what duration? As compared to which company? Accounting for intangibles? Valuation of non-monetary factors? Accounting for market gyrations? Primacy by what percentage? That dissenting paper glosses over much of the nuance of Stout's thesis [3], as well as case law ever since that point to the problematic practicalities of courts deciding how companies should carry out the distribution of the benefits of organizing stakeholders together.

So many people who should know better keep repeating this canard. Shareholders can certainly mount a challenge through corporate governance channels for example, but they fare poorly when mounting a challenge through the courts.

[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

[2] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2022/04/26/why-we-should...

[3] https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Why does it matter? Well, because the higher valued your company is, the more investment you can get, and with more investment, the better you can beat the competition.

And if you don't do it (bad stuff), then your competition will do it and will ultimately will beat you.

So it is basically the only way to survive. That is, keep growing. Stop growing, and you are on path to demise. No public company have the luxury of saying "Well, we have grown enough. Let us just focus on sustaining what we have got".

The sales-force are bonus-pay-based on how much cloud they sell.

Some of the development groups are paid for delivering sustainable software that is also open-source.

It's not black and white. Many politics are being played.

I do believe Scott Guthrie and some of the other VP's are good folks that understands the need for being open and honest. Anders Hejlsberg too for example.

But is's not black or white.

Yes

> and to boost the share price

Not exactly. They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and must always act in their best interests. But the law allows a great degree of freedom in interpreting that. For example, actions that may depress the share price in the short-term can be argued as being good for the long-term health of the company and the courts are OK with that argument.

You should have felt free to say that it is utter stupidity for people to assume good faith for public companies. But sadly, the times we live does not allow pointing out stupidity in a harsh manner. Don't go easy on stupidity people. You will end up in a nice stupid world without joy or happiness.

> always assume bad faith when you're dealing with a company.

I think this is the biggest problem that humanity is facing right now, and a lot of currently accepted "mainstream" end of world problems derive from it.

And the issue is that these entities are locked in a process where not-the-fastest-growing means on the path to death. And to side step this, they have to do bad things without getting caught. The dominant player will be the one who does the baddest things without getting caught.

For example, In the world of pharmaceuticals, the dominant player would never be the one who play by the rules set by the authorities. But the one who has got authorities on the payroll.

If you are starting about "evidence that authorities are on a payroll", take a look at the above point regarding "not getting caught"...

Sadly, this does remove the higher bounds to what a company would do to secure its bottom line. Which is why I think this is the biggest danger that humanity faces right now. And this is going to get worse, because what ever higher bound we have right now, is going to be pushed higher and higher, in a world full of perpetually distracted people...

I think this is true for large organisations, the larger they are the more their behaviour seems to become dictated by the rules of the environment it operates within; whereas the smaller the organisation the more principled they can be as individuals have the power and will to override those rules.

Also with something as large as Microsoft there are so many departments that one can be actively working against the interests of another, i.e MS can and probably does simultaneously do good and bad faith activities for open-source - and yet we commonly anthropomorphise them as if they have the integrity and consistency of an individual... A human flaw i guess.

"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” ... this belief is utterly false."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/public_benefit_corporation

Agree with your arguments, but more generally companies are inherently evil by default, because their only goal is to maximize profits. You can only hope that they will behave correctly regarding their employees, their competitors, their neighborhood, and the environment.

Does Microsoft contribute financially to any social programs or other philanthropic projects? Are all those contributions done solely to support their bottom line?

Being anti-“M$” is one thing, but you it’s hard to disagree with their stance on philanthropy and environmental issues.

What?

However, there are several legal opinions that complicate this interpretation.

I recommend you read the case eBay v. Newmark that very much complicates this. Here is a nice summary:

https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...

You might also look at Dodge v. Ford Motor Company one of the more in-famous cases supporting/complicating the shareholder value "requirement". In it's opinion, the Michigan Supreme Court in-famously states: "A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders."

Both cases deal with companies will very small numbers of shareholders where minority shareholders successfully litigated based on some argument that the majority had a responsibility to maximize their minority returns.