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Comment by laughing_man | Hacker News Reader

They've done the calculation. They'll lose X income because of subscribers who leave, and they'll get Y extra income from the ones who remain. If X < Y then implement policy.

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Companies increasingly no longer even care about income.

They care about what boosts investor confidence.

So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.

It's almost as if making companies responsible for performance of their stock backfired to the tune of "a measure that becomes the goal ceases to be a good measure".

It's simpler than that. To a public company, the product is the stock price, and the customers are investors.

Consumers exist as a resource to consume. You hold the same mental position in their minds as the cheap plastic packaging they had to purchase.

The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.

30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.

I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.

It's not meant to be idealistic at all. There very much should be a whole lot more that goes into the decision to raise prices or introduce ads or whatever that might upset your customers.

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