[0xbadcafebee]

> Snowflake has no incentive to push a code change that makes things 20% faster because that can correspond to 10–20% drop in short-term revenue.

If they improve performance they can lower the cost to customers, which will make the product more attractive to prospective customers. But if they are already swimming in cash they may not feel the need to gain more customers.

Only threats prompt companies to improve things. Threat of a competitor, threat of losing all their money, threat of bad PR, threat of regulation, threat to the stock price, etc.

I see this every day in companies that don't care about managing their cloud costs. They waste money like crazy because they literally don't care if they lose money, because some exec doesn't care, or they got enough funding until the next round, etc. A couple years later another exec asks why the CISO/CTO is spending so much money without any ROI, and then everybody has to stop everything they're doing to shave pennies off cloud costs.

Companies run by individual executives are insane. I don't understand why people allow companies to be run this way. I think a co-op where employees could be active participants in the running of the company would allow for more sane decision-making.