By their nature, almost all economic transactions in a free market system are mutually beneficial to both parties or the transaction wouldn't take place. That d

By their nature, almost all economic transactions in a free market system are mutually beneficial to both parties or the transaction wouldn't take place. That does not mean that many companies do not make short-sighted decisions that harm themselves, their industry, and customers over the long term. Here is a small list of examples which might serve as examples where decisions eventually hurt the company itself rather than only customers: - early refusals to sell music, movies or television shows online - highly inconvenient DRM strategies - "closed software is more secure", and other non transparent practices - cost cutting measures by manufacturers that reduce a product's durability in ways that are not obvious in the store Google could monetize the information they can mine from their users more aggressively. They could also more actively depart from standards, such as by removing IMAP access to Gmail or requiring some proprietary plugin for Youtube. We'd be worse off, and Google would lose a lot of users and ad-viewing eyeballs. That still doesn't mean that it is a given that they would make these decisions. Facebook seems to have little reluctance when it comes to changing user agreements in non-obvious ways for the purpose monetizing their data, I switched from Yahoo mail to Gmail eight or nine years just because of IMAP, and Microsoft tried to push Silverlight for video content. Even in the case of a cooperative game where mutually beneficial choices can be determined, that outcome is not always the result. What's wrong with being grateful that Google (at least some of the time) has apparently chosen such strategies? Claims that their benefit is somehow at the expense of users confuses the situation with noncooperative games, and suggests that Google would be better off not making the decisions that have benefited users, too.