My take, and I'd love to hear any contrasting opinions, is that this is due to shareholder supremacy. Once a company has shareholders, it is beholden to them. T

My take, and I'd love to hear any contrasting opinions, is that this is due to shareholder supremacy. Once a company has shareholders, it is beholden to them. The purpose of the company isn't to innovate, or do good in the world, or make their customers happy. It's to make money for their shareholders. Now, in order to make that money for shareholders, they're going to need customers that are satisfied with their product. They might need to innovate to stay competitive. They might need to actually make the world a bit better in order to stay solvent. But at the end of the day, they aren't going to sacrifice shareholder rewards for their customers, innovation, the betterment of the world at large, or for anything else. It's simply not their modus operandi.