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gruez • today at 1:17 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

>I understand this is true in a strictly legal and financial sense.

"Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business. Getting salty because a company decided to switch to a more profitable customer, while understandable, is also totally unreasonable. It's like getting mad at a band for selling $1000 concert tickets after they made it big. Doubly so when the product segment being affected is essentially a luxury product to begin with.


Replies

ehnto • today at 2:39 AM

You're not really arguing anything here except that greed is expected, which is fair but not logical in the sense that, there is nothing about a business that says it has to operate this way, and no law that says being a fair and good entity in our community is necessarily going to bankrupt them. It's a choice leadership makes, for obvious and boring reasons, to fuck over the general community.

Big music artists could totally sell cheaper tickets and still make enormous piles of cash.

Nvidia could have continued supporting the consumer market alongside their AI ambitions.

The sad part is that we simply don't expect it anymore, because we no longer see businesses as part of our communities. Just as profit engines, with no other goal.

Companies don't exist in a vacuum, they are entities in our community, and we should expect them to behave in a way that is beneficial and fair, and sometimes that might be at the expense of unrealised profits. Not bankruptcy obviously, but there's a wide gamut of extreme prosperity between bankrupt and trillion dollar market cap.

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bigstrat2003 • today at 5:02 AM

> "Legal and financial sense" is how you run a business.

That is how immoral people run a business. But there are a great many businesses in this country run by people who (correctly) recognize that there are higher obligations than the law and making a profit. Treating your customers fairly, making good products, doing things in an ethical way... these are not optional to a well-adjusted person, even if not required by the law.

Continuing to serve your loyal customers even has benefits above and beyond the intangible. When the bubble pops (and it will pop), Nvidia's sales to AI customers will crater. When that day comes, they will come to regret chasing away all the customers who would still be giving them business if they had not been cast aside as "not profitable enough, sorry guys".