> if you could continue to make money and employee thousands of people for 10+ years of slowly declining revenue and relevance, would you refuse it?
I sure would. I've seen that happen at a couple of companies where I know people and it's entirely depressing. Slowly declining revenue on the path to planned death means:
* knowing that the next round of layoffs will always be soon
* having a hard time retaining people
* having a very hard time hiring people
* nobody wanting to do deals with you
* having to pay way over market to keep the people you have
* workers much more inclined to negative behaviors
* no sense of promise in the future
I would much rather sell individual pieces to companies that can make use of particular assets, move as many people as possible to other companies, and then gracefully wind down whatever's left.
In my view, profit isn't why we do things, it's just how we measure sustainability of a venture. Maybe there are people out there who would be happy working in a dying company trying to suck every last nickel of profit out. But those aren't the kind of people I'd hire on the way up, so there's no way I'd ask them to spend years being miserable on the way down. I'd also be reluctant to sell my customers to somebody who would be happy doing that; I wouldn't trust them to do right by the users.
I sure would. I've seen that happen at a couple of companies where I know people and it's entirely depressing. Slowly declining revenue on the path to planned death means:
* knowing that the next round of layoffs will always be soon
* having a hard time retaining people
* having a very hard time hiring people
* nobody wanting to do deals with you
* having to pay way over market to keep the people you have
* workers much more inclined to negative behaviors
* no sense of promise in the future
I would much rather sell individual pieces to companies that can make use of particular assets, move as many people as possible to other companies, and then gracefully wind down whatever's left.
In my view, profit isn't why we do things, it's just how we measure sustainability of a venture. Maybe there are people out there who would be happy working in a dying company trying to suck every last nickel of profit out. But those aren't the kind of people I'd hire on the way up, so there's no way I'd ask them to spend years being miserable on the way down. I'd also be reluctant to sell my customers to somebody who would be happy doing that; I wouldn't trust them to do right by the users.