Great products loved by customers don't seem to be what the free market rewards. It's almost looks like customer passion is an inefficiency which the market tends to eliminate and not as an accident but rather as a general rule.
Customers love your product? Great, here's a very attractive offer, we buy the company and make it "efficient" which somehow tends to make the product shitty and the customers unhappy.
I think one way to phrase this in a way that reflects how the market works is that sellers often very much under-value the worth of the brand itself, and buyers know this. If you can buy a brand for X and exploit the customers who trust that brand for 2*X, then it's worth it even if it destroys the brand that was truly worth 10*X in the process. The trouble comes when X is large enough to buy (almost) literally anyone out -- "F-You Money" -- and the seller don't care what the true value of the brand is because it's yacht time, baby. And the employees & customers get screwed.
If this is a problem we want to solve, the answer IMO is stuff like employee-ownership & unions.
I think that having corporate charter/bylaws include things like company long term health as a guiding principal over short term gains may do it. Along with explicit limitations on the money an executive can take in any given fiscal year.
> It's too abstracted from externalities - from slash and burn asset sweating, to environmental damage to abusive employment practices offshored or put at arms length through contractors
None of this is intrinsic to corporations, and all of it can be legislated away without changing what it means to be a "corporation". This is just thinly-veiled advocacy for communism.
Hard disagree - communism and under-regulated financialised free-market capitalism are not the only alternatives available. Numerous potential political and economic systems, and combinations of those systems have and will likely exist in the future. There's literally nothing inevitable about the particular mixture of state backed shareholder corporate structures that currently hold sway.
The international order as it stands today radically differ in substance and practice to the corporate, legal, tax and intellectual property laws of even a half century ago. Although of course the idea of a corporation dates back at least to the sixteenth century - when they were explicitly created as vehicles of colonization - East India Company, Virginia Company etc.
I'd go so far as to suggest we literally cannot continue as a functioning civilisation under the current international order. We likely agree on one point though, we're more likely to fail as a society than change it without violence.
I love Sierra games growing up, but I've come to understand that they were not great games and often quite user hostile, but benefited more from being early movers in an underserved market. They rightfully deserved all of the success they had at the time, but as the market shifted, they eventually just fell to those changes as most privately funded companies do. Not enough capital to pivot, and not enough capital to improve their core technologies through sufficient R&D.
Ken Williams tried to innovate into new underserved markets (e.g. dial-up gaming services pre-Internet), and "buy R&D" by acquiring other companies, which worked for a while. But his core founding game designers had been surpassed in the industry, and their location made it very hard to recruit new talent. The shift to higher resolutions and 3D obsoleted their core technology and the technical talent they had just couldn't keep up. (source: there's a few very good long-form interviews with Ken Williams on these business realities).
Sierra was not going to make it as a software house, the writing was on the wall for a while. They tried to switch to using their established sales channels and turned to distributing and did really well for a few titles like Half-Life and Homeworld, but then those companies went elsewhere with the market. By the "end" Sierra itself was mostly making card games, and then blowing most of their budget on buggy, late to market, and underperforming 3D versions of their main series.
Selling the company was really the only alternative for them, but once you do that you give up vision and control.
It's sad how they ended up, and I'm thankful for the memories, but things move on.
I love Sierra games growing up, but I've
come to understand that they were not great
games and often quite user hostile, but
benefited more from being early movers in an
underserved market.
Harsh, but so true.
(And I'm somebody who was absolutely enthralled by about a half dozen of their adventure games back in the day)
Even if Ken and Roberta hadn't lost control of the company, I'm not sure what Sierra would have offered the world creatively at that point.
They were eclipsed by LuscasArts in the world of point-and-click adventures, and it's not really clear they had another core competency on the game development side of things. If Phantasmagoria was any indication, they seemed to want to go in the direction of "Digiwood" games with FMV but that whole genre of games turned out to be a massive dead-end for the industry and is not particularly fondly remembered.
I still celebrate Sierra, though. They absolutely moved the industry forward, and were at the pinnacle of the industry for a decade or more. Few have achieved as much, or entertained as many! Roberta in particular is a bit of a hero of mine and on a personal note I love that her and Ken are still together after all these years.
I think there is truth to what you said but you also have to be careful not to judge 1980s games by 2020s standards.
All the games were user hostile back then. You could play a sierra game with hostile user input parsing and really nice graphics for the day. Or you could play another game that was even more hostile but had no graphics or vastly worse graphics, and often with next to no story. Often you had to be a huge nerd to even get the games to run at all. You probably needed to learn a lot about DOS config or how to write .bat files to get sound to work or your graphics to work right. A typical non-nerd consumer would probably never have figured out how to get it to run unless maybe Tech Support was excellent back then. My Dad was an engineer.. no way we'd have ever gotten them to run without his knowledge.
A lot of the negative stuff happened at the very end before they were acquired and then after they were acquired. But even in the early 1990s they had some mega hits.. they just weren't in the original lineup of adventure games. IMO the adventure games never really worked once they started using the mouse. They were less hostile but just seemed dumb. In the early 1990s the Dynamix games Sierra published were great though, those were/are some of my most favorite games from my childhood. What was hostile about those was getting them functioning in Dos though. I remember Metal Tech Earthsiege being a real huge effort with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the whole game to function.
I wanted to play a lot of these games bad enough to learn more about the computer worked, the hostility probably contributed to me going down the path of studying CS.
I think the point about hostility was not necessarily the operating environment as much as the game dynamics, which were based on frustration and repeating an action many, many times until stumbling on the solution.
>Great products loved by customers don't seem to be what the free market rewards
Dunno, if I read the same text, but Williams retired early, and rich. Good reward if you ask me
>tends to make the product shitty and the customers unhappy.
Experimentation, and advancement makes one to step in the wrong direction more often than not, and it's absolutely fine. A product, or a brand may expire, and diminish, but gaming in general does pretty well, and offers more today compared to 90s
This is one aspect that Tencent has done very well on. They've put a lot of money into various (western) game companies and those game companies don't seem to have flourishef with it.
I can't really think of a western investor that does the same.
It's not even that kings used to have nice things and now more people do (certainly not everyone). It's that a lot of people in absolute terms and almost all people in the first world have nice things, and kings had comparatively awful things but at the time it was the best in the world.
The Soviet had a lot of nice things, including consumer electronics. Doesn't seem to be tied that hard to capital accumulation as the driving force behind production.
Europe has had several 'mixed' economies that worked rather well until they decided to become more capitalistic.
Btw, socialist camp (mostly Soviets, East Germans, and Bulgarians) practiced stealing R&D from the West to such an extent that we all really should praise capitalism for being development force for both sides of the Cold War.
There was a lot of homegrown research too, and they put people in space before the US managed it.
Comment above claimed that only under capitalism can we have nice things, which is a blatant lie. Arguably it's due to central planning and a high degree of enforced conformism that China manages to keep up with mass surveillance and production output.
Personally I'm not particularly fond of the state and very suspicious of the presumed necessity to have one.
There were a lot more homegrown research than even you believe, but socialism doesn't reward risk-taking, and it doesn't reward improvements in work culture (because both increase economic inequality), so most of it remained in dusty boxes forever. While everybody who took decisions preferred to rely on copying proven things capitalist countries already started to make. Up until the moment when ever increasing lag made it impossible even to re-create something even having full set of freshly stolen docs.
As for nice things - it seems to be somewhat poorly defined expression. You could have sex in USSR, or go to a forest to pick some mushrooms, and that were nice things I guess? But situation with consumer products, including food was abysmal compared to even worst examples of capitalist world.
Sure, when you're threatened by a state that has used nukes against a rather large population, as opposed to the 'testing' in the Pacific or Siberia, and apparently is run by insane genocidaires, you're going to become very, very paranoid and expect espionage everywhere.
Of course they copied what they could. Like we all do. Information is addictive and wants to be free. But the USSR had a very skewed view of life on the other side of the 'curtain'. It was also not as propped up by colonialist endeavours as the US, and if you'd have pulled that value out of the US economy the USSR might have 'won' the Cold War.
Yeah, there were rather neat suburbs and relatively well stocked shops in the US, but was it worth the genocide in Guatemala? The undermining of democracy in Europe? The return of heroin as a widely available drug of abuse?
Same goes for the UK, was the wealth on those islands worth the long line of southeast asian famines? The terror and exploitation in Kenya?
I'm no friend of soviet or chinese attempts at reaching communism, but the claim that they haven't achieved any nice things because they weren't capitalist is blatantly untrue. From this follows the conclusion that we likely could move on from capitalism and possibly achieve a global society that isn't centered around economic transactions, conflict, exploitation and surveillance. Some would say it's necessary due to the damage to our habitat industrialisation has caused.
I think the only consumer electronics we had in our family before 1991 was a small black and white TV that went through a dozen repairs and occasionally required a hard kick to function properly.
OK, I don't doubt that, when I grew up in Sweden I had friends that didn't come into contact with personal computers until the mid-nineties and had like phone on a copper cable and a CRT-style television with two or three channels and not much else. Pocket calculators were treated with suspicion in schools. My parents were relatively into new technology so they got me a used, cheap C64 pretty early, though.
It surely wasn't equally distributed but the USSR was quite deep into engineering and technology, the 'scientific socialism' thing, so they made their own multimeters and pocket calculators and radio equipment and whatnot.
Compare the average Soviet family to the average US family in the 60s-80s.
The standard of living is not even close.
Also, when did Europeans have a higher quality of life vs US postwar? Socialism creates general malaise and considerably lower growth.
Socialism has been proven to be an academic pipe dream that only somewhat works with small, culturally homogenous, high-trust populations. Scale it up and the inefficiencies/corruption grow exponentially. When resources are allocated inefficiently, everyone suffers.
The US is still a developing country that even lacks universal healthcare and needs uniquely high investment in state violence to protect itself from reform and competition.
The cool thing about capitalism is you can start competing companies to offer better products. At least so far as the industry is or isn't highly regulated.
I get you're probably being sarcastic and this was a throw away comment, but capitalism is also why we have all the nice things in the world that we do.
I'm still thinking capitalism used to be best during the Cold War, when there was a competing system in the eastern bloc - this led capitalist countries to try to prove that they can increase the standard of living for all, even the less better off. Since that alternative turned out not to be long-lived, capitalism has been growing more and more ruthless...
This is I think the root of the problem. Capitalism (perhaps unsurprisingly?) works best when it actually has to compete with another world view. It would be nice if there was a competing world view that didn't result in hundreds of millions of deaths over a handful of decades, though.
I don't think that there even needs to be competition (although that works best) - you can make do with two other things: motivated citizens, and a non-corrupt government.
Laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work - that's pretty much obvious to everyone, and most people then take the next mental step of realizing that things sufficiently close to laissez-faire capitalism don't work, either.
The next realization is then "well, how do you stop yourself from sliding into something "sufficiently close"?" and the easiest answer is through carefully-controlled government regulation motivated by an active populace and a non-corrupt government.
Communism advocates, as can be seen in this thread, strategically ignore the fact that the same reasons that we're seeing capitalism "failing" (as this failure is incomparably better than anything seen in communist countries like the USSR and China), which are apathetic citizens and a corrupt government, are necessary preconditions for a socialist/communist model to even have a chance at succeeding - because, of course, they are either shockingly ignorant of history, or they think that they'll be the ones to come out on top and be the leaders of the new authoritarian government.
An under-examined problem is that one of the most successful products of capitalism is capitalists. Those selected for 'leadership' by the market are rarely going to be vulnerable to long-termism and empathy, or more generously are going to be the best at rationalising their own self interest (see Effective Altruists).
Customers love your product? Great, here's a very attractive offer, we buy the company and make it "efficient" which somehow tends to make the product shitty and the customers unhappy.