5 ms·

I don't think this general notion, that a company can have some kind of intrinsic evil or goodness that is somehow immune to management changes, changes in comp

I don't think this general notion, that a company can have some kind of intrinsic evil or goodness that is somehow immune to management changes, changes in competitive landscape, and generational shifts resulting from the passage of time, is really rational. Companies are not people. Companies can't have nor lack a moral compass that tells them right from wrong. Companies are run by people. These people are the ones making the business decisions and doing the work that enables the company as a whole to do ethical or not-so-unethical things. The people running these companies can and do get replaced. And when enough of them get replaced, the past actions of a company will no longer be representative of its potential tendencies from that point onwards. This is very simply because a new set of people will be the ones making business decisions and doing the work, and these new people will become the real moral compass behind the company's decision making. And let's not forget the fact that even people can change. So what's stopping them from changing while running a company, which would thereby be reflected in the actions of the company itself? All of this change tends to happen slowly and gradually, but change itself, for better or worse, is inevitable as long as a company remains solvent. Of course, I'm certainly not suggesting that I know for a fact that Microsoft itself has turned an entirely new leaf. In fact, I find all of their recent actions toward limiting user freedom and privacy as disgusting, exploitative and unethical as most others in this thread. My point is, however, we should try to judge each individual action of a company on their own merit or lack thereof, rather than always viewing them through a lense tinted by some extrapolation of their actions from 20 years ago into some fundamental measurement of the company's intrisic goodness or evil. At the very least, we should try to make an effort to calibrate our lenses to weigh new information more favorably than old, because otherwise, even when the company itself may have long moved on, our opinions of them will forever be stuck in the past.

Nursie 10y ago
So there's no such thing as corporate culture?
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  There certainly is. I'm not sure where in my post you're detecting that sense of absolutism you're reading into it. But culture, like everything else in a company, is also shaped by its people. Which means culture can change as well. Any change will be a slow process due to inertia, but it can and will happen if enough people in the company want it to happen.
  - xtian 10y ago
    The question is not whether a company can change, it's whether it will. The values and priorities that a company emphasizes condition employees and managers to think in a certain way. Changing that conditioning over a large population and after many years takes more than a few personnel replacements and a new mission statement. Any new people you add will be significantly outnumbered by existing employees, so how do you get "enough people" to want something they've learned to not see?
    - lewisl9029 10y ago
      > The question is not whether a company can change, it's whether it will. I think whether a company can change is the right question, because it stands to reason that if a company can change, then given enough time, it will change. How much time is "enough" for any given company is anybody's guess, and as stated in my original post, I'm certainly not claiming that in this case Microsoft has in fact changed for the better. But to rule out that possibility completely because of what they've done in the past strikes me as irrational.
mtgx 10y ago
> Companies are run by people. That's only true to a certain extent. Don't forget companies are mainly run by profits. That's what really ends up deciding how the company is run. Do you think a "good guy CEO" would stop Microsoft from extracting billions of dollars worth of royalties for bogus patents from Android and Linux vendors? Of course not. If there was such a CEO, he'd be quickly shut down by the board. And if the board were "sweetheart angels" that would ask for that, too, they would be replaced by investors. So companies are really more like a machine, and the people are more like cogs in it. The machine's main goal is to produce profits. If one of the cogs says "no, that's not what we primarily want!", it will very likely get replaced. It takes a tremendous amount of will power to fight against the machine's desires, and it's usually only strong founders that can do it (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk). But those are the exception, not the rule. And even then, it's more about delaying profit gratification, rather than foregoing some profits altogether. It's about them knowing that if they do it their way, the company would be even more successful and profitable in the long term, while the machine's forces demand the profits right away.
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  Definitely a fair and salient point. Though I would argue turning a profit and acting ethically aren't always conflicting concerns. In fact, ethical behavior is just another knob in the machine that people running a company can turn either way in their quest to maximize profit. Erring on the side of too much ethical behavior can certainly impact profit in the form of lost efficiency and market opportunities, but we have to recognize that companies' customers are people too, and people generally have a distaste for unethical companies, and a fondness for ethical ones, that may influence their decision do business with them. So turning the knob too far to either side can have direct and indirect implications for profit, and it's up to the people running the company to calibrate that knob in either direction. Oftentimes the courses of actions a company can take on any given issue will not be a simple sorted array of choices with an obvious straightforward relationship in the form of less ethics -> more profit, but rather a complex decision matrix of causes and effects for which the outcome of any single option will be impossible to fully predict, and investors can generally see that too. So the people running the company will usually have some degree of freedom to experiment with which direction to turn the knob on ethics, and how far.
forgotmypw 10y ago
If you replace all the pieces in a boat, is it a different boat? You suggest that it is, but I think it's pretty much the same boat.
- lewisl9029 10y ago
  If people in companies were literal straw men, your straw man would have a point.
- lvoudour 10y ago
  The point of the paradox [1] is to replace/upgrade all the pieces with similar ones (planks with other planks). Unless you believe that human beings are interchangeable, it doesn't apply in this case [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
  You're getting crap for saying this, but you've hit the nail on the head. As people are replaced in a company, what does the company do? They backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left! In my experience, the net difference is next to nothing. Companies take on the behavior of the personalities of the people at the top. Nadella, like Gates and Ballmer before him, was selected based on shrewdness, and everything flows from there. It's simple. The company will continue to bear the culture born of Gates because of their board (at the top), and their HR department (everywhere else).
  - barkingcat 10y ago
    Absolutely they do not "backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left!" They in fact back fill the role with someone they think should be in charge of the future of the position (which is very often in a radically different direction), or more often than not eliminate the role altogether. By your estimation, when Steve Balmer retired, the board would have hired another Steve. No, that's not the case. They hired Nadella who is different.

Nursie 10y ago

So there's no such thing as corporate culture?

lewisl9029 10y ago
There certainly is. I'm not sure where in my post you're detecting that sense of absolutism you're reading into it. But culture, like everything else in a company, is also shaped by its people. Which means culture can change as well. Any change will be a slow process due to inertia, but it can and will happen if enough people in the company want it to happen.
- xtian 10y ago
  The question is not whether a company can change, it's whether it will. The values and priorities that a company emphasizes condition employees and managers to think in a certain way. Changing that conditioning over a large population and after many years takes more than a few personnel replacements and a new mission statement. Any new people you add will be significantly outnumbered by existing employees, so how do you get "enough people" to want something they've learned to not see?
  - lewisl9029 10y ago
    > The question is not whether a company can change, it's whether it will. I think whether a company can change is the right question, because it stands to reason that if a company can change, then given enough time, it will change. How much time is "enough" for any given company is anybody's guess, and as stated in my original post, I'm certainly not claiming that in this case Microsoft has in fact changed for the better. But to rule out that possibility completely because of what they've done in the past strikes me as irrational.

mtgx 10y ago

> Companies are run by people. That's only true to a certain extent. Don't forget companies are mainly run by profits. That's what really ends up deciding how the company is run. Do you think a "good guy CEO" would stop Microsoft from extracting billions of dollars worth of royalties for bogus patents from Android and Linux vendors? Of course not. If there was such a CEO, he'd be quickly shut down by the board. And if the board were "sweetheart angels" that would ask for that, too, they would be replaced by investors. So companies are really more like a machine, and the people are more like cogs in it. The machine's main goal is to produce profits. If one of the cogs says "no, that's not what we primarily want!", it will very likely get replaced. It takes a tremendous amount of will power to fight against the machine's desires, and it's usually only strong founders that can do it (Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk). But those are the exception, not the rule. And even then, it's more about delaying profit gratification, rather than foregoing some profits altogether. It's about them knowing that if they do it their way, the company would be even more successful and profitable in the long term, while the machine's forces demand the profits right away.

lewisl9029 10y ago
Definitely a fair and salient point. Though I would argue turning a profit and acting ethically aren't always conflicting concerns. In fact, ethical behavior is just another knob in the machine that people running a company can turn either way in their quest to maximize profit. Erring on the side of too much ethical behavior can certainly impact profit in the form of lost efficiency and market opportunities, but we have to recognize that companies' customers are people too, and people generally have a distaste for unethical companies, and a fondness for ethical ones, that may influence their decision do business with them. So turning the knob too far to either side can have direct and indirect implications for profit, and it's up to the people running the company to calibrate that knob in either direction. Oftentimes the courses of actions a company can take on any given issue will not be a simple sorted array of choices with an obvious straightforward relationship in the form of less ethics -> more profit, but rather a complex decision matrix of causes and effects for which the outcome of any single option will be impossible to fully predict, and investors can generally see that too. So the people running the company will usually have some degree of freedom to experiment with which direction to turn the knob on ethics, and how far.

forgotmypw 10y ago

If you replace all the pieces in a boat, is it a different boat? You suggest that it is, but I think it's pretty much the same boat.

lewisl9029 10y ago
If people in companies were literal straw men, your straw man would have a point.
lvoudour 10y ago
The point of the paradox [1] is to replace/upgrade all the pieces with similar ones (planks with other planks). Unless you believe that human beings are interchangeable, it doesn't apply in this case [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
You're getting crap for saying this, but you've hit the nail on the head. As people are replaced in a company, what does the company do? They backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left! In my experience, the net difference is next to nothing. Companies take on the behavior of the personalities of the people at the top. Nadella, like Gates and Ballmer before him, was selected based on shrewdness, and everything flows from there. It's simple. The company will continue to bear the culture born of Gates because of their board (at the top), and their HR department (everywhere else).
- barkingcat 10y ago
  Absolutely they do not "backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left!" They in fact back fill the role with someone they think should be in charge of the future of the position (which is very often in a radically different direction), or more often than not eliminate the role altogether. By your estimation, when Steve Balmer retired, the board would have hired another Steve. No, that's not the case. They hired Nadella who is different.