The purpose of a for profit company is to provide a good or service and profit from doing so. You don’t need to be acquired to accomplish that.
> profit from doing so
Is the first actually a requirement? I can think of plenty of companies that do the second part well, but have nothing to do with the first one.
I understand you think they provide a service since you seem to not understand what a patent troll is.
As a reminder, a patent troll company is a company "that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll)
They don't sell any services, don't do any (reasonable) licensing, nor provide any goods.
Not to mention “trolling” is already passing judgement on the activity to begin with. The actual service is licensing. I’ll leave it to the courts to determine whether enforcement of patents qualifies as trolling or not.
Oh I'm sorry. I meant to say "Patent Trolling Companies", is it easier to understand now?
I'm sure you are aware that there actually is a category of companies that just participate in "patent trolling", and do nothing else. Not sure why you're being so pedantic about the grammar instead of trying to reply to the actual arguments...
They don't seem to be significant enough to the overall general statement that companies exist to serve their customers with goods and/or services.
I'm not sure how valuable it is to argue with someone who cannot read two messages up in the message hierarchy...
Do you mean the one you mentioned 4 messages up? And dropped with this?
> Ok, lets hear you argue for what service a patent troll provides.
Sure - the one you dropped was domain flipping. Clearly buying something at a certain price and then selling it again is not nothing - that's why people pay for it. Just like house flipping. Or just buying anything speculatively. I assume you realised that, and dropped it for that reason.
In the vast sea of companies, those are a super teeny tiny share of companies.
The purpose of a company is to make a profit and provide a good or service. In that order. Everything else is a hobby.
Generally speaking, private non-subsidized companies that offer goods and services for sale cannot actually survive without any profit, right? They can bootstrap for a while with investment, but they tend to die, statistically speaking, if they prioritize goods and services over profit. The way companies tend to survive death is by doing everything they can to ensure that the sale of their goods or services generates a profit. You might also be temporarily forgetting that it’s also incredibly common for companies to pivot on what products they make and sell whenever they’re not making enough profit.
TBH it actually seems really funny to me argue about which comes first, because the kind of company we’re talking about needs both, it doesn’t otherwise exist. But the idea parent shared, that profit takes the highest priority, is often absolutely true in practice, many companies will do everything they can to avoid not making a profit, from lowering the quality of their goods and services, to coming up with other more profitable products, to merging with another company that has more customers for your product and/or a longer runway.
That has changed, especially since the 80s, where the prevalent world view turned to "let's have the market figure out purpose", which equates to anything that is profitable is good.
We've since learned that this isn't automatically true (as exemplified in this abandoned merger, for example), and my understanding is that right now there's no clear opinion in society whether profit or purpose comes first in companies.