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Comment by jjuhl | Hacker News Reader

Why are you trying to provide "reasons"? You'r a company. You just want to make the maximum amount of money. Everyone knows this. Why try to pretend anything else?

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Why are you so cynical? When a company does anything its essentially to make money but we can laud companies for positive decisions or criticize them for negative ones.

SPOT's decision actually hands more money to the real investors over large institutions or individuals with lots of wealth that get to get in on the IPO strike price and cash out after a few days or hours into the market opening.

Short answer: you are right, the goal is to make the maximum amount of money. I believe that justifying themselves with other reasons allows them to make more money that if they openly said they want to "Make money".

Basically, PR and a nicely crafted story maximizes the amount of money you get in return. People like nice stories.

Well, most people are ignorant and naive.

But you make a lot of specific efforts to keep them such society wise? If you keep them ignorant en masse, then you can introduce only partial services, charge, and then introduce a bit more, charge.. etc.

It is possible to start off in a great way, instead of this way which is very manipulative, and depends on keeping them ignorant.

Anyway maybe it was just the typical programmer arrogance, so then I am.. still not sorry.

Yeah but it's kind of bad feel of slight deception to it, no?

The whole story thing, I think it's sometimes a bit of a excessive Western thing, that yes it works, that may at some point become even boring to listen to,

Yet another cooked story. Rags2riches and what not. The garage (but son of a lawyer or a banker) the rise to fame and glory (from the garage right) blabla.

It is damaging but it's too contextual and subtle to see in a civilization hat still currently likes to cut off a lot of context. Even a lot of such stories are possible only due to big de-contextualization culture wise, which forces everyone into this deception game. Which on top brings money, but must have negative effects which are very hard to grasp/see.

I don't know. This is too deep and "you" are not supposed to talk about how it works in public.. don't ask don't tell.. sneaky operators.

Companies aren't just supposed to make the maximum amount of money. If they were, then everything would be a bank.

Companies are better thought of machines, like tractors or printing presses. You buy a tractor and a printing press to ultimately make money, but the tractor and the printing press actually DO things. That is why it's importing to provide reasons.

Sort of. Banks don't actually have that high of return on equity compared to industrials.

I tend to think of it more like a source/sink model. Some companies are net sources of capital: agencies, most manufacturers, etc. Then there are sinks: railroads, blast furnaces, semiconductor plants. Sources produce free cash flow, sinks are a great way to earn x% on a billion or three of capital (not as easy as it seems).

This is how Berkshire runs their balance sheet and it's pretty smart.

That's wrong. A company's goal is to provide a worthwhile good or service. It does this effectively by generating profits that can be reinvested into growing its services or goods. And when it can no longer efficiently reinvest its profits to providing a better service or good, it instead returns the profits to shareholders so that they may reinvest those profits into companies that can better utilize the capital to provide useful goods or services.

Then by your logic, these things the company values must be profitable choices.

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