You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.
as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.
if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.
That is a big if which is straightforwardly false. This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy [0]. Whereas the reality is that even the structure of a market itself creates friction. One of the main points of business schools is learning how to recognize and take advantage of this structural friction, which business people then conveniently forget when it's time to assuage their own egos regarding their counterparties.
[0] which is basically in the realm of asserting P == NP. The supreme irony is that if the efficient market fallacy were true, then central planning would also work as well!
Imagine if the owners of modern day factories thought a little more like this [0].
Option B: the business stays afloat, investors make money, customers keep the product, some employees get fired with a severance.
You think option A is superior?
Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.
What I see here is "Business stays afloat, investes make money for now, customers get a continually worse service and eventually leave, and a lot of good talent is out on the streets over corporate greed". This is only a win if you're an investor, and only in the short term. So I'm not convinced this is better than option A in the long term.
it's immoral to lie to people.
very few people can do the mental gymnastics required to equate " we look forward to realizing Vimeo’s full potential as we reach new heights together " to "you're all getting fired."
at some point in the now far-distant past CEOs used to make heartfelt speeches and memos to a soon-to-be-downsized staff about how hard decisions had to be made and blah-blah-blah; now it's more about sequestering the decision makers away from the damaged goods while projecting daisies and sunshine for would-be investors.
The game has shifted far from the human factor into a purely financial/investor loop. Good for some people but generally worse for people .
And before I hear it : Yes it was always about money, but business wasn't always about investors . That projection of liability to a remote party is exactly the issue.
Going from "you're fine" to "you're fired", when it was always going to be "you're fired".
Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
>and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
well, 15 of them or so.
There are proper ways to let go of people, but that's not how it's done in the US.
So if you got fired tomorrow for no reason in particular, you would not feel "harmed"? No family to support, bills to pay, or career to progress cut short? No trips nor big purchases that need to be re-planed or cancelled? No obligations you need to cancel because last week you were fine and this week it's all about scambling for a new job? This is the most asinine thing I've heard here yet.
I didn't have a choice in my society on what contract to take. And the power dynamic is unequal. I don't consider being suddenly laid off as "harmless" with that in mind.
