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Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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A privately owned enterprise can. Publicly traded ones can’t. A privately owned enterprise also doesn’t need to make more money, if the owner doesn’t want that. A publicly traded company that has to answer to its shareholders has to make more money and to keep growing to appease said shareholders. If you don’t have shareholders you don’t have to do anything like that. That doesn’t mean, of course, that any privately owned company is automatically good – many aren’t – but it does mean that they have the capability to not be evil.
@accideath We started by talking about Microsoft, and I was explaining that there's no such thing as "enough" profit for a capitalist enterprise.
There are many organizations that are not capitalist enterprises. There are small businesses and cooperatives where the owners deliberately keep profits low. The small business doesn't have a conscience; the owners may. And it leaves them vulnerable. Small businesses destroyed or absorbed by larger ones is the third oldest story in capitalism.
As long as we‘re in a capitalist market, which we are and probably will be for a while, any for-profit company, however small or big it is or however private or public it is, is a capitalist company. You have to be in order to make profit. At all. And yes, usually, the bigger they are, the worse they are. But not every for-profit company is evil, thus not every capitalist company is evil.
And businesses do have a conscience. It’s the sum of their owners‘ consciences.
And also, you do not need to be evil to be successful although it is probably easier.
@accideath No, an organization does not have a conscience. It is not the sum total of the consciences of its owners. It is not a collective person. It is an engine.
One of the reasons to be clear about this is that you can quite easily find people who believe that Microsoft, for instance, is doing good in the world. I used to work for Microsoft and met career Microsoft people who obviously sincerely believed in it.
You have to first understand how the engine actually works.
That would suggest even more, that the conscience of a company is the sum of the conscience of every decision making individual affiliated with the company. Companies can have values (and I‘m not talking about the "we‘re family here" values from the company handbook but the values that are actually enforced and acted upon. Those translate into the conscience