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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, I just assume that no company can be trusted these days.

It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.

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There are a few. Cockos makes an amazing Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that competes with the top names in the industry.

While much of the rest of the industry is moving to subscriptions or jacking prices, Cockos has kept their prices extremely low and push new releases consistently.

A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest, unless you can somehow guarantee their leadership won't change (or is unlikely to, at least).

> A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest

If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".

I suspect the incentive to care about company reputation has genuinely decreased.

I'll note companies seem genuinely okay with being on lists of the most hated brands in America.

Edit: typo

> > A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest

> If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".

They are doing "right thing" now so later when they dominate market they will be able to squeeze you like a lemon. Scorpion and a frog situation. It's just in their nature.

When does the “for now” stop? When is a brand actually a mark of a certain quality and when is it a facade for a swapped tooling line backed by a dozen products? We might have had reliable brands once, but no longer — now all products have to be evaluated individually.

Darn Tough has made some fairly consistently awesome socks up in VT for a couple decades now.

I used to get some great stuff from icebreaker too, but after they were acquired by VF (also owners of Vans and North face), surprise, surprise, pretty much zero purchases since.

don’t jinx it!

Is there a reason for this trend? Why does so many companies seem to have stopped caring about their long term reputation?

Because the owners are not in it for the long term. It’s an agent problem - if they can take a company with a 2% profit margin and juice that up to 10%, they’ve captured 5 years worth of profits in a single year. If it takes 5 years for the market to catch on that the company’s gone to hell, that’s 25 years worth of profits available for stock buybacks-err, new investments. The company’s dead within a decade, but the owners and investors got a bucket full of cash.

Under Clinton, there was an effort to tie executive compensation to company performance. The idea was good, but the consequence was that executives got paid much more in stock than in cash. That led executives to juice the stock price.

The trouble, perhaps, is that the only ways of measuring performance tend to be financial.

Perhaps a poll of the employees, or an association of customers, ought to figure somewhere.

> The trouble, perhaps, is that the only ways of measuring performance tend to be financial.

An other strategy would be to place a financial value on "trust". That should be too hard, since brands already have financial value tied to them.

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