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Comment by pbasista | Hacker News Reader

> They are entirely different business models, run with different profit motives.

Why should that be taken into account?

> don’t let other bullshit that isn’t relevant to the business affect your decisions

Why not?

If you only consider one aspect of a complex issue and make your decisions around that one aspect only, you might be missing out on the bigger picture.

Take Trump's "Dumbest Trade War in History" as the WSJ calls it. Why are e.g. Canadians not buying US goods and why are they cancelling vacations in the US?

Is it because they have better vacation options in Canada? I do not think so.

They are doing it because they take the bigger picture into account. They do not care about temporary discomfort it might bring them. They know that they need to send a strong message to Trump. And they are doing it with their own wallets.

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The comparison you’re making does not hold up because it mixes two completely different types of decision making.

A consumer boycott is a personal, values driven choice. The goal is to express disapproval or take a stand, even if that means some inconvenience. It is about signaling, not about making the most efficient or practical choice.

Business decisions, especially around infrastructure, are made within a performance and value focused framework. The goal is to choose the best tool based on reliability, cost, support, how well it fits the business need and whether it brings value. If a business starts picking tools based on emotional reactions or symbolic gestures, it risks undermining its own operations without achieving any value.

So why not let irrelevant factors influence the decision? Because doing so leads to worse outcomes. You end up with inferior tools, higher costs, and more complexity, all without moving the needle on whatever issue you are trying to protest. HP’s enterprise printers products are fundamentally different from their consumer inkjets with different support models, economic models for parts and supplies, and so on. Ignoring that difference just weakens your argument and leads to poor decision-making.

The difference between HP and HPE is one is a really expensive way to get crap service and parts and one is a cheaper way to get crap service and crap parts.

This is admittedly recent. Within last 5-6 years.

> You end up with inferior tools, higher costs, and more complexity

Possibly, yes. These are the tradeoffs that the businesses are sometimes willing to accept. In exchange for achieving something else that is beyond their own short-term business success.

In general, I think that businesses should take the broader picture into account because if they only think short-term and prioritize local gains, they might go bankrupt in the long term.

Take the Chinese 5G chips for example. They might be great value for money. But they might also contain backdoors exploitable by the Chinese government. Should the US mobile carries, for example, be using them? Just because in the short term that would make them more money? I do not think so.

> all without moving the needle on whatever issue you are trying to protest.

Why would you think that?

If business customers stop buying for instance the HP enterprise products, I am sure that HP will notice. And then HP will either have to adjust to what their business customers actually want and take into account the reasons why they are boycotting their products and services. Or HP may continue to lose business customers.

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