1. Tautological: from company's perspective, it's bad for the company (itself) to go bad.
2. More broadly, it's reasonably self-evident that it's bad for employees, and bad for shareholders of a company, for that company to go bad
3. Where we can have discussions, and probably for a long and fun if not necessarily fruitful time, is whether it's "good" or "bad" from market's, or consumer's perspective for companies to go bad. I personally think not.
I think we'll likely mostly agree that it's good for market to filter out and punish bad companies or companies that go bad, once they go bad, for whatever reason; but that doesn't necessarily imply or follow that's it's good for companies to go bad.
In other words, what's your perspective/bias - why would it be GOOD for a company to go bad? Why would it not be absolutely fantastically wonderful if all companies perpetually stayed good and we lived in utopia of rainbows and unicorns? :>
(all this without defining what "company going bad" means, left as an exercise for the student :)
> Where we can have discussions, and probably for a long and fun if not necessarily fruitful time, is whether it's "good" or "bad" from market's, or consumer's perspective for companies to go bad. I personally think not.
Generally where my head was at. The other two points were better scoped. I personally think it's good that companies go bad, as it moves control over productive assets from one group to another. This is good for society for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is enabling new ideas to be tried. Can a long lived company try new ideas? sure, but the degree to which they avoid risks (if they live a long time they necessarily avoid undo risk) puts on upper bound on how ambitious they are with new things.
I can think of another aspect of the badness: It's bad for geographical regions that have become dependent on the company. Intel is Oregon's largest private employer, for example, and most of this employment is in the Portland metro area. If Intel were to go away next year this area would be hit very hard economically. That's not going to happen, of course, but one can imagine a long slow decline. Tektronix used to be a very large employer here - employed about as many at it's peak in the late 80s as Intel employs here now. Tek went into decline in the 90s, fortunately Intel's star was rising then. As Intel's star declines it's tough to see a new replacement for the area.
It's an example of the general problem, it would be better if Intel (and some "competitors" to keep prices low) could always perfectly adapt to new technologies etc, and retrain people.
When they can't it's good companies come and go, or Kodak would still be blocking digital cameras (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kodak-bankruptcy-idUSTRE8...) but the price we pay is things like wasted effort on re-implementing everything that didn't need to change at the new place, good people can't always move to it as you mention, etc.
Different countries at different times adopt different positions on the scale between inefficient (?) state-linked monopolies with jobs for life and letting the market do its thing. I'm not sure what factor means that sometimes we end up with Samsung and other times British Leyland.
That itself is an example of capitalism as the least worst option... similarly how much effort goes into trading currencies or commodities or whatever just so people get a fair price and aren't screwed over by whoever is the only person selling at the moment they need something. But we're self-interested, biased, and this is the workaround (or the system that emerges from our nature - self-interest is turned into the energy behind it all and "greed is good").
Sometimes on net things are good because of other effects like "ah, promising new competitor gets a chance to shine!" but if you could have _both_, you absolutely _would_. A company going bad is a _cost paid_ for new blood, not an _added benefit_.
It's not good that you have 100 fewer hours when you spend 100 hours creating something awesome. It's bad that you have 100 fewer hours. If you could create the same awesome thing and still have those 100 hours to do something else, that'd be fantastic.
All other things being equal, I would far rather Intel be awesome than not. If it turns out the world is such that all other things can't be equal, it might be worth having Intel not be awesome in favor of other benefits, but I'm never going to be _happy_ about Intel not being awesome.
Hard disagree, so I wonder what your basis for this bullet is.
Agree on the other two though.