Go fash, lose cash. 👍🏻

Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.

Interesting deep dive and very much worth a read. I’d say it probably underestimates the weight of finance-related pressures coming from the CFO’s office, though.

Yes it does, yes it’s brilliant!

Google has literally been reporting billions of net profit every quarter.

This is about appeasing shareholders. The capitalist class hates that tech employees have been able to command decent salaries and has been striving to push back for a while now.

Looks like an encoding problem, not a font problem. Make sure your terminal is configured to use the UTF-8 encoding.

Maybe read the fucking room, Mal.

Well, damn. What sad news. :(

He’s an African actually, look it up.