[kbenson]

> We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis

We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.

In that light, I think the chance of a product being allowed to sit and fulfill it's purpose gracefully, at least for services that are major moneymakers, is essentially nil.

Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company. At least, that is, until some large public company sees a way they can "improve" on that model and either buys them up or uses their size to bully them out of market (it's not really free market competition to use billions of VC money to undercut competitors until they fold and you have all of the market).

It's all horribly broken.

[_jal]

Yeah, this is the root problem. If you want to break from mandatory upgrades (this includes "cloud" stuff, where you have even less control over software), you need vendors that aren't forced to invent reasons to build them by their operational structure.

This is a "Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house" situation.

Not unrelatedly, I strongly support Debian and think everyone else should, too. Software in the Public Interest (https://www.spi-inc.org) accepts donations for them.

[saghm]

> We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.

> Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company.

I'm probably just naive or missing something obvious, but fundamentally it doesn't seem obvious to me _why_ public companies should be treated differently as investments. Ostensibly the original reason stocks had value is that when companies were making money, they'd pay dividends, but like you said, this isn't really the mentality anymore. The stock is worth something because someday if the company makes more money, someone will buy it for more money than you paid...but why? So they can sell it when the company is making even more money later? It seems like if companies don't end up eventually paying dividends at some point, there's no reason why the price of the stock should be related to the amount of money the company makes. The only other thing that shares really do is give very limited voting rights, but this seems like it's not remotely worth enough per share given how much you'd need to have to even begin to influence board elections, which in itself is a very indirect way of influencing the company.

[wilkommen]

It’s not a very satisfying answer but personally I believe that there is no material thing linking the price of a stock to the amount of money the company makes. The only thing that drives the price of a stock is whether people think that other people will want to buy the stock for more later. This kind of implies that the whole stock market is a bit of a sham. Which I think is also true. I think the stock market essentially operates as a semi-perpetual Ponzi scheme. It does suck to come to the conclusion that one of the most central systems in world finance is not based on any fundamentals, but the good news is that in no way does that mean the system is unstable in the short to medium term. Nearly the whole world, and almost everyone in power anywhere in the world is pretty heavily invested in the stock market Ponzi scheme continuing to “work”. So it probably will for quite a long time.

[Gene_Parmesan]

I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. If this were true, an investor like Warren Buffett, who has always invested by focusing on the fundamentals of the company he is investing in and focusing on real performance/value metrics, would not be able to be as consistently successful as he has been.

It's hard to say though, because the market in which he made his initial chunk of capital is not the same market today, and it's impossible for me to parse out the self-reinforcing effect of "price goes up because Buffett has taken a large stake" versus the sort of fundamentals I'm referring to.

edit : Having said that, I do believe there is a class of people who are able to make money off of the stock market in a way totally unrelated to the reality of the underlying instruments - profiting on churn, market-making, small percentages on massive positions, etc. But I don't think that means the underlying instruments are actually worthless/not tied to real value.

[dzonga]

laws of nature always win at the end of the day. fundamentals are important, so long can a software saas company make money by selling software to other vc funded saas companies.

at one point the free money being thrown around then spent on saas, cloud and marketing with fb / google will be pulled back. and then we will see who's naked. it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it will happen.

hence buying a piece of a sound business like buffet does, will win at the end of the day. it's not glamorous but it will win.

[jakub_g]

IMO fundamentals win long term, but I also think that company being hyped is often a self-fulfilling prophecy: they suddenly get crazy amounts of capital for free when they stock is high which they can use to for securing loans, transactions, salaries etc. to grow bigger and faster.

[kbenson]

It's pessimistic of me, but I suspect that once the current crop of tech is no longer appealing for large investments some other sector will be found for the long term pump and dump.

The method of Buffet/BH obviously works, but it also seems like it requires a lol it knowledge and skill and patience, otherwise it would be much more popular. Rolling a new mark (or the same marks with a game with a new name) is much easier and reliable for those with less skill.

[evandwight]

Some owners of private companies don't see the goal of the company as profit maximization - eg SpaceX.

With a public company there's always going to be a shareholder to sue you for not maximizing profit.

https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...

[justahuman74]

SpaceX is somewhat expected to produce profit at some point, else it would have been registered as a non-profit

[evandwight]

SpaceX definitely wants to make a profit. I don't think building a city on Mars is profit maximization though and this is Elon's explicit reason for not taking SpaceX public.

> According to the company, the short-term demands of shareholders conflict with his long-term ambitions.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121515/will-el...

[123anonanonanon]

Beside dividends there are also buybacks.

[mcny]

» Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company.

I don't know if anyone has any chance if Stack Exchange can't stay independent. Like the product was arguably "done" years ago if you ignore monetization.

» As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (AEX:PRX) has announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion dollars.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-...

» Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

» This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can hire excellent people.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...

[kbenson]

> This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent.

Sometimes I wonder if the people writing these are actually as oblivious as they sound or is they're self aware enough to now be using this verbage to actually be messaging the exact opposite, given how many times this has been written and shown to be false, no matter how much people want it not to be.

Does anyone actually believe that SO isn't beholden to the owning entity, and that no control will be exerted?

[krageon]

Almost every takeover starts with this lie. I can't imagine anyone actually falls for it, it's just repeated by marketing types because it sounds good.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Just FYI. The app that I’ve been working on is designed for a “comfortable stasis.” It may take some time to get there, but I have no interest in metrics-driven growth, or appropriation of people’s PII.

We are likely to introduce changes, over time; but these will all be completely focused on Serving our users’ needs more effectively.

Kind of refreshing. I’m working for a 501(c)(3), and we don’t need to show “growth”; just Serve our community.

[kbenson]

Nice! Here's to hoping it's successful and provides benefit to people, and doesn't trigger some startup founder to think they can "monetize all that potential you're leaving on the table" or some such.

I say that jokingly, but honestly, a non/not for profit is probably an really good way to structure some of these things to do an end run around both the market and people's expectations, so I sincerely wish you the best in whatever your endeavor is (and you can consider this me politely asking what it is, so you don't have to feel like you are injecting it into the conversation). :)

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I am not at liberty to discuss it, at the moment. Even when it ships, it probably won’t be mentioned here, as it Serves a very specific demographic, and probably won’t be of interest to most folks.

You can always contact me (via my Web sites), and I could talk about it a bit more.

[mro_name]

> only one thing. Growth.

It's engrained in the money system (money as debt) but I guess the cause stems deeper from human nature.

As nomads, keeping things was near impossible, so aquiring was a permanent necessity. (And pollution no issue btw)

That's what we were for 300k years, and isn't easily changed with a few compliance rules.

What we need is balancing rules, that take the anthropologic reality into account. Not personal wealth maximisation.

[marcus_holmes]

I mean, technically you can write the goals of the company into its charter as whatever you want. It doesn't need to be money/growth/etc. And you could, technically, find investors who will back that goal with their money. And you could, provided you jump through the relevant hoops, take that company public. I'm not sure what restrictions exist on the markets, but I don't think there's anything technically stopping someone from creating a non-profit-oriented public company.

[the_other]

> We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.

If you have good product-market fit, then “shrinking” is growth. By “shrinking” I mean automating more, becoming more efficient, streamlining. Pay off excess staff in shares and free them up (and yourself) to work on something else.

[Valakas_]

Totally agree with your comment about the cancerous need for growth. If a company is not growing, immediately it's seen as if something is wrong with it.

[barrenko]

Or, as per NNT, Big Companies just seem to want to die.

[OtomotO]

The only thing that doesn't stop growing, is cancer.

The focus on growth is disgusting and cancer for the real world, the environment as well as society

[dang]

Please don't post generic ideological comments or flamebait to HN. It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[tonyedgecombe]

It stops when it has killed its host.

[taneq]

Not voluntarily.

[stevofolife]

[flagged]

[dang]

Probably because it was a generic ideological comment, pointing further in the direction of generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and repetitive and something we're trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You broke more than one of them here—I'm sure unintentionally.

[stevofolife]

Makes sense. Thanks for the heads up.

[astrange]

Socialist economies need growth or else all your citizens start leaving and you have to build a wall. That and it's cruel to not let their economy grow when everyone started out in poverty. China is obsessed with economic growth.

Hardly any economic motivations are removed by getting rid of shareholder capitalism; you still have markets, a growing population, and you still need productivity to increase.

Oh, and eliminating growth would destroy the environment because 1. environmentalism is a luxury good 2. low-productivity technologies consume much more resources than modern ones do.

[stevofolife]

I agree. However, the type of growth you're addressing here is different from the growth in social media companies. The growth in ad-tech based companies are by nature very artificial when put in economic terms. One can easily argue that these companies provide value by enhancing the reach and personalization of your marketing activities which results in increased sales and brand exposure. But at the very end of the day, how is an ever increasing of consumer spending GDP going to solve real life and death issues? Growth becomes relevant because capitalism is very focused on generating profit, you can either increase revenue or reduce cost, which one is easier? Increase revenue which then leads to, "let's get more users".

[BoardsOfCanada]

Removing capitalism doesn't have a great track record. Maybe the problem is more fundamental than capitalism.

[Valakas_]

Unregulated capitalism you mean.