[echelon]

Lots of companies found greater success post-IPO.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft (especially recently), Nintendo, Tesla, etc.

The IPO is a statement to investors that the company believes it will grow bigger and seeks public market funds to accelerate growth. That doesn't always happen.

Some companies and investors see the IPO as merely a liquidity event, which is the wrong perspective to take. SPACs were clearly being abused for this.

[adql]

Not talking about company being more successful but better to the actual customers. Google isn't exactly a good example here

Also Microsoft went public almost 4 decades ago, apple went public over 4 decades ago, the landscape looked a bit different there.

[everdrive]

As the other commenter noted, I’m talking about value to the customer rather than value to the company. WRT your list, I would only claim Apple as a clear success in this regard. (I don’t particularly like Apple myself, but Apple does seem to be giving customers more of what they actually want.)

Microsoft - Ruining Windows to extract more value from customers.

Facebook - hardly anything even needs to be said here.

Google - slowly getting worse and rotting away.

Tesla - I’m a bit neutral here. Tesla has its problems, but it’s not clear that they used it be amazing and now are just trying to extract money from users.

[whoopdedo]

You give Apple too much credit. The original Apple I and Apple II were a hacker's delight. They went public in 1980 and the Apple /// was a failure. Then came the closed architecture of the Macintosh. Ever since Apple has been known as the company least friendly to hackers.

[JohnFen]

I still feel butthurt and betrayed by Apple because of the Mac.

But in fairness to Apple, the Mac marked a point where they overtly wanted to ditch their (then) current customer demographic and switch to an entirely different customer demographic. Which they successfully pulled off. And they do seem to be giving those people what they want, they just don't want the likes of us.

But, back to the topic, I consider Apple to be an example of a company going public and having an excellent product ruined as a result.

[frunns]

Facebook is my main argument why IPOs suck. Facebook used to be a decent platform, post-IPO it's awful. Might be unrelated to the IPO, might not. But yeah, financially it might be "better", as they're more heavily exploiting their users' attention.