Exactly. A lot of boneheaded corporate decisions make a whole lot of sense when you think about the individual manager/exec who would've been empowered to make

Exactly. A lot of boneheaded corporate decisions make a whole lot of sense when you think about the individual manager/exec who would've been empowered to make that call and which metrics might get that manager promoted or fired. The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph. The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz. The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.