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0 pointsolex1y ago0 comments

This is an often stated postulate, but I'm not sure I agree. Sure, making money is necessary for a company to survive, but it doesn't have to be an end goal, and imho it's detrimental when it is. The goal can and should be to make a great product, create and make available something that otherwise would not exist, improve some product or process, etc - money and company itself are or should be just a means to a goal like that.

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Gormo1y ago· 3 in thread

And the measure of how well you are making a great product, creating something that would otherwise not exist, or improve some other product or process is how much your customers are willing to pay you for what you are doing. If you are creating value for other people, you are making money -- money is a measuring unit that quantifies transferable value.

rakoo1y ago

No, because that falls under the fallacy that every market is a perfect market, where none is.

A perfect market is one where

- alternatives can be created for little to no money so they can easily exist

- consumers have an infinity of time, money and energy to analyze products

- consumers have total agency over their decision

- picking an alternative has no cost, no drawback

- it is possible to buy nothing and still be content

There are 0 markets that fall under those conditions. The measure of how good your product is is not in its sales figures it is in... reviews.

Gormo1y ago

>No, because that falls under the fallacy that every market is a perfect market, where none is.

No, it doesn't. We live in a stochastic world, not a deterministic one, and nothing perfectly fits any speculative model. There are always outliers and edge cases, and that's fine -- the world doesn't need to perfectly adhere to any model in order for the model to be more accurate than not in the general case.

And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.

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UncleMeat1y ago

I don't think that this is true. There are plenty of businesses that make shitloads of money off of frustrating or downright crappy products because of captured markets, constrained customers, lack of transparency, and more.

Look at something like Dark Patterns. These make a business more money by making a product worse.

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