646
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
646 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
57226 readers
4090 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Man... in a better world Nintendo wouldn't have a case because liberating encryption keys is the basis for interoperability, which is good for, you know, competition. Competition is good. Or so I've heard.
That's how it was. Then the "infinite growth" mind virus infected all of the private sector. I think it's because with the internet and global markets, the competition between firms isn't about fighting for customers - the customer base is essentially infinite, or at least much bigger than the firms need, so the goal isn't to serve your customers better so they come to you instead of your competitors. What's scarce is investment capital - more and more of the equity markets are consolidated into fewer and fewer players, and since the modern share market is much more speculative (i.e. investors buy not on the expected value of the share of the profits they get as dividends, but on the ability to flip their shares to someone else at a higher price later, who in turn is only buying because they anticipate flipping the shares, there's no regard to the fundamentals of the business), the goal is to compete with other firms by showing the capital investors that you can offer the best return on investment.
Under this mindset, you don't have customers to serve, you have assets to monetise, you've gotta show the moneymen that you're getting faster and faster growth with lots of new revenue streams - you don't actually need for these to pan out, because noone cares about whether you're actually making profits so much as whether you look like you're growing so you can be flipped to another speculator. And in that mindset, customers are an obstacle - they're preventing you from monetising your assets by standing between you and their money.