On the business of life

[drwex]

I'm mostly dumping this here so I can reference it later, but commentary is welcome. This came out of a discussion of the relationship of WiiTID to the profitability of the enterprises that employ people like me:

Profit is like health, to a corporation. You have to have it, and more is good. But it's not the reason for existence.

Comments

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

I noticed the "zero-based/noncheating" disclaimer, but wasn't sure if you meant by that to exclude the actual world, or if you meant to assert that the actual world was like that.

Oh, the actual world is emphatically not like that. I don't mean to exclude the actual world entirely (or we're talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin), but rather to strip away a large number of layers of history.

your addition of "gaming the system" and "innovation" add complexity to the discussion but I don't quite follow the argument you're making with them.

Sometimes, it is possible to reduce costs (and, assuming the retail market holds steady, thus increase profits) by acts of fraud. We can all agree that this is bad; the original American "war profiteers" were the scam outfits who provided "boots" to the Union Army in the Civil War which had cardboard soles. This reduced costs, but we'd be hard-pressed to consider what they provided to be "boots".

But other times, such substitutions can be made legitimately. For example, when McDonalds was having problems with consistent dairy sources for their milk-shakes, they started using seaweed instead, and changed the name of the menu item to "Triple-Thick Shake". It might not have been a milk-shake anymore, but it is arguably more nutritious than the item it substituted. This was lower-cost, more consistent (and thus of higher quality), and much more profitable. It was another value-add. I'd therefore not consider this fraud (especially as they stopped claiming that the item was a "milk shake").