[syshum]

See I have the opposite opinion to you.

I think one of the biggest problems with business today is that fact that we in society have removed "personification" from the company, companies are made of people, and allowing companies whole to act as if they are amoral automatons with their only goal profit seeking removes the ethical obligations of the people that make up said corporations. Allows management to hide behind phrases like "it is not personal it is just business".

So no a company may not be a person, but people are in charge of it, people make the choices and policies of the companies, and as such those people though be personified and held to an ethical standard and foundation on behalf of the company.

Explaining away all of Apples anti-consumer policies simply because "Well the damn lawyers" as you have done here is a massive evasion and redirection of responsibility that the management, engineers and really every employee of apple as to their customers

[oneplane]

I think you have to know the inside to know where you can change them from the outside. As an engineer or logistics expert, you have no leverage inside a company to modify those policies. When you say a company is made up of people, and try to personify it, you, and many others also try to vilify the same people. Imagine working somewhere and championing an internal policy reform (which takes ages), and reading some unknown person writing angry crap about you, that's not a very nice thing. Responsibility is an equally useless word here, as you can't expect all 'responsible' parties in one company to have the same opinions. Say you have 100.000 employees working at Apple, do you really think they all share your views? Even if they all have a responsibility to make your life easier for you, you can't expect them all to believe in the exact same way or route to accomplish that. Put 10 people in a room and you'll have enough opinions and methods to give you a headache, let alone over a ton of them. This is why they have some sort of chain of command that removes some responsibility and capabilities down the chain. That also means that you can be mad at the engineers all you want, but it doesn't mean it's their fault or that they are 'out to get you'.

Business scholars devise calculations where you can put in the laws and requirements of your business and out comes the way forward, often not in favor of the consumers. If you want that to change, well, then capitalism gets in the way and that's when you need laws or shareholder/board-level influence if consumers want that to change.

Your opinion is based on the idea that you can make overall structural changes based on the same principles as making changes to government; but the difference is that there is no way to reach the business part of a company short of changing a law or simply not buying the product.

The scale of operations often doesn't allow for certain changes due to the cost involved, especially when it comes to catering to an insignificant amount of people (such as independent repair shops or consumers that want low level access to everything).

When I write about where the policies come from and why things are in a certain way, that is not opinion but a reflection of current operations. My opinion and the reality don't match, but that doesn't mean I'm going to declare my opinion as fact or yell on a social media platform that "personified company X is malicious". It doesn't help, it doesn't change and it is far from constructive.

On top of that, most policies in larger corporations are in place because they were implemented buy lawyers by directive of business management driven by the wishes of boards and shareholders. Unless you can communicate to, and convince the shareholders, boards and other actual decision makers, all the screaming and opinions are worthless. Especially when it's 1000 people yelling and 100 million people not yelling but being consumers all the same (and paying for products).

In my opinion, all devices should be completely open and manageable by whoever owns them, but that has yet to become reality. Even basic stuff such as parameters for the ECU in almost all cars isn't freely available. Plenty of good & bad reasons for that, but still a bummer when you simply wanted to change a bit in a register to enable or disable a function that suits you.

[pastage]

Saying "this company is malicious" is away to build public outrage which is quite useful if you want to change company policies.

I do not agree with you on many points but that these kinds of policies are hard to change is obviously true.