Frankly, we should all have learned by now after example upon example of this bait and switch type behavior being pulled on us. They lure the children into their windowless panel van with the candy of a cool offering and then violate us once they’ve slammed the doors shut and have us captured. Why are we still falling for this trap of becoming dependent on these hosted services?
Is it laziness? Lack of competence? Comfort? Stupidity? Foolishness? After shooting ourselves in the feet several times whose fault are these types of things? We know the predators will predate … Why do we still wander into their jaws?
We know there are open source Slack alternatives. Is it education? Is it naive contract terms? What makes us so foolish?
High time preference. The free stuff is here today, and the pain will only come much later, so I can disregard it for now.
I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”
Same with private VC/PE held companies. The board will replace the C-Suite if they aren't maximizing value.
You'd need to find a company which is huge but privately held by a group of people with only good intentions.
* Fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interests. This is not the same thing as "maximize profits".
Maximizing profits makes the stock price go up. That benefits the C-suite. Because they're paid in stock.
The board designs their compensation package that way because they figure "number go up" is the easiest way to show they're acting in shareholders' interests.
I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities
Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
Strix became less hidden for me personally after listening to The Life Scientific interview with John Taylor [1]. There is plenty of fascinating information, probably because Jim Al-Khalili is a great scientific interviewer. Recently, I recalled it in the context of AI, self-driving, and safety. Strix controllers have a second level of protection if the main automatic shut-off circuit fails. That’s probably why we never hear of fires or other incidents due to a failed Strix controller.
In some sense, what seems important is a business culture that has a mission or meaning to exist other than make shareholders money. I'd wager their employees will absolutely geek out about what the companies do throughout the organization. A lot of corporations these days, once you get above a couple of layers of management, is all fluff. I can't think of the last time I talked to a mid-level or above "engineering" manager in a tech company about any nuanced or interesting discussion about technology.
Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
>By 2019, Deng had turned his attention to consumer goods. Pool robots, though low-profile, offered untapped potential, especially in markets like the US, where high labor costs made automation more appealing.
>“For what these machines can do today, they should cost USD 300–400,” he said. “That’s already the cap. Anything higher is just an ‘IQ tax,’ unless the cleaning function actually gets significantly better.”
The problem is that you want other people to fund your goodness.