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Comment by tallanvor | Hacker News Reader

The real issue is Garmin's lack of communication.

I'd be willing to bet that their legal and finance teams are fighting to keep them from saying anything (their earnings call is on the 29th).

So much goodwill is lost by companies that don't communicate when problems are affecting customers.

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>The real issue is Garmin's lack of communication.

And here we are a full day and a half into the outage and no update and no ETA, just the same generic "Sorry, we have an outage bro" message that they put up a few hours in. I guess if this really is WastedLocker they're just sitting around arguing over whether to pay the ransom.

I'm sure it's a massive fire inside their walls right now. A tweet over 24 hours ago is definitely not going to bring confidence on any progress. Speculation will fuel a lot of negativity until an official update is provided.

Working in transaction consulting I beg to differ: This simply already puts the earnings call on Wednesday in a bad light, much more so than if they e.g. communicated the real issue and, if required and possible, delayed the earnings call... Transparency is valued and priced highly by analysts these days, the worst scenario is that there is no real transparency in the call itself, then "all bets regarding GARMIN's future are off".

Because as a customer, you're still the product.

I'm sure any communication will have to minimize stockholder impact and will be watered down instead of being 'Oh shit, all of our crap is encrypted'

> Because as a customer, you're still the product.

That is simply false. I'm fine with people making that claim about companies like Facebook and Google - they make most of their money selling advertising, so yes, in that sense, their users are a product they are offering to advertisers. But that's not how Garmin works.

Garmin provides products to us, and offers services that they hope will keep us in their ecosystem. Unless you have reasonable evidence that they are lying in their privacy polices, such as at https://www.garmin.com/en-US/privacy/connect/ , then you cannot reasonably make the claim you have made.

I understood the parent to be commenting that Garmin is repackaging customer revenue as a securities product, i.e., their common stock, which they sell to investors. Point being that investors are the key stakeholder, not customers.

It's not a unique POV for a company to have, it's just it's maybe more a subject of laser focus for companies in this era.

That could be extended to all publicly traded companies using that logic.

And a lot of people make that argument. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that this isn't some flaw in the theory - the theory is exactly that most, perhaps all, publicly-traded companies are answerable to their shareholders, not their customers. Attempts to reform or mitigate this often fall under the umbrella of "stakeholder capitalism," in which the customers are viewed as one of the stakeholders that needs representation, because they don't currently have any.

I got a feeling customers are more "sentient" than stock holders that can't care less about the whys or whats about the company. It is just another stock in the portfolio that is traded at market equilibrium among other stocks.

The customers has to do a informed choice.

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