Why would it be detrimental to society? Many companies have developed all the products they're likely to ever develop, so why would you maintain the same level of operational costs as when you expected growth? There's no guarantee that the prices charged before the acquisition were sustainable either.

Not much you can do. The alternative is bankruptcy that does a similar thing to workers. But it at least doesn't let the company make blatant lies of a PR statement.

The main thing to do is make it so you can't just lay off people as easily as you can in the US for pretty much no reason. But it seems workers are still too divided to really come together and achieve such 9initiatives. Be it unions, pressuring their governments to make new laws, or simply chastising and boycotting companies who engage on such actions.

SaaS is the detriment to society. Static feature software continually updated and changed to create a faux justification for $20 of your money a month, keeping you on an endless treadmill to in order to work with all your old data.

Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...

Private equity (what's being described here) has more political influence than "society" because money.

This is just how capitalism works in a competitive environment: it allocates capital as efficiently as possible.

I despise their business model, but it is what it is.

In the Reagan loving greed of the 1980s this was considered vile, movies were made and the people that did it excluded from polite company.