[mhuffman]

>Business school will tell you constantly that best quality is where you want to compete in almost all cases.

Hmmmm, I don't remember it that way. I remember the constant take was to build a moat (typically based on intellectual property), then optimize net profit and/or network effects. Quality never really came up unless it is so bad as to cause lawsuits.

[schmidtleonard]

Yeah, it's the exact opposite: business school teaches you that you should avoid competing on price/quality at all costs and all the ways to avoid competition: network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, predatory pricing, information asymmetry, etc.

Of course, right after teaching you how to exploit all the bad incentives created by capitalism they teach you that the government is to blame for all bad incentives because capitalism only makes good incentives.

[mhuffman]

lol, yes. In my case the "govt. is the cause of all bad incentives and just turbo-fucks the customers/markets with laws and regulations" came before all the tools that one might use to make profit. Also rent-seeking was lionized (eg. event ticket "middle-men" that purchased all the tickets and raised the prices) as fundamentally necessary to the markets along with strategies like when to use "dirty marketing" against opponents and of course there where the required ethics courses to round out the education.

Interestingly, the claim about competing on price was that it would just inevitably lead to everyone lowering their price to zero marginal cost, so you should find other ways to differentiate yourself or to use IP to sue others from not competing.