I get what you're saying, but I’m not sure it’s fully true. If it were true, then all public companies would be bad (using bad in a loose sense here). I think Apple, for example, has a good balance between optimizing money and product.

Well, maybe only in the sense that you still seem to be willing to buy. But the amount of people willing to pay the apple tax seems to be shrinking lately, considering recent reports of low sw quality and let's also throw in the 4-digit monitor stand stunt.

The quality of Apple's own software is terrible nowadays, they are a prime example of this erosion of end user value.

>then all public companies would be bad

That would be correct