alt Hacker NewsWhy 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.
They don't just maintain these products, they enshittify them to extract the maximum possible profit from captive users, until someone else comes in and builds everything from scratch all over again.
This is crazy inefficient yet it's not captured in our economic theories, so we're essentially blind to it.