alt Hacker News> They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works
Where does this myth come from, and how does it survive? It's either an excuse for parasitic corporatism, or an expression of learned helplessness. Nobody has been successfully sued for prioritizing the long-term health and reputation of a company over self-starving quarterly profit.
Is there a perverse incentive toward the latter anyway? Yes. But it mostly serves current leadership, who are evaluated and paid on short horizons, at the expense of the long-term investors who own most of the equity.
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> They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors
"Obligation" is the wrong word. Should be "incentive".
many readers here have not experienced a standard of customer support that was common decades ago. Google in particular created a new standard for ignoring the customer on a large scale, in my own experiences. Secondly, the customer paid money to a company for service, while an emergent business form does not take money from the customer directly, blurring the definition of customer.
I strongly agree that failure to stand for consumer rights is both learned helplessness and an apologist cooperator psychology. CA Voter here.
Definitely not a myth, friend. Read this article from Harvard Business School: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/fiduciary-duty-to-investors
"Accepting funding from investors puts you in a fiduciary role in which you’re responsible for managing their money and putting their needs above your own"