[Ethan_Mick]

This is very similar to an except in Derek Sivers book on cdbaby.com. (CD Baby let independent artists sell their music CDs on the site long before iTunes). In it, he writes:

  At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, "What if
  every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that'd
  be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?"
  
  I said, "Honestly, I don't care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians.
  If some day, musicians don't need CD Baby anymore, that's great! I'll just shut
  it down and get back to making music."
  
  He was shocked. He had never heard a business owner say he didn't care about
  the survival of his company.
  
  To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers
  more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good
  service? *It's all about them, not you.*

I think a lot of companies forget that.

[jesuscript]

The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not. This is natural. Everyone after sees the validation of the product as a validation of a money printing machine and will look to run just that - a money printing machine.

Hate to deify a Steve Jobs, as if he needs more god-like overtures, but that is what will always make him different than your Tim Cooks of the world (or your Sundar Pichais of the world as opposed to Larry or Sergey, your Activision-Blizzard management versus just the original Blizzard team).

Two completely different types of animals. In a sense, that’s why we usually describe this loss as a company’s soul leaving it. The why goes missing and the what, which is always money, is all that’s left.

[Laremere]

I'm racking my brain trying to remember where I heard it, but I've heard it roughly summarized as: Companies are founded by people who are loyal to a vision, but tend to promote people who are loyal to the company. Eventually the people who are loyal to the company have all of the power. The people loyal to the vision are only left in the lower ranks, if at all.

[Fnoord]

The shareholders won't care about that, but a private owned company can care about it. Even successors. Startups generally attempt to become publicly owned, so they use bait and switch. And most fail anyway (to become a unicorn). However, even a CEO can care about it, its just that they ultimately fall under authority of the shareholders / board.

[kmonsen]

I think it is extremely unlikely that Jobs would have said well then we just shut down Apple if there is not a need for us anymore. From what I have read he was a business man first. He also very clearly had a very good sense of product quality and was good enough technically to understand not only what was possible, but what was going to be possible in 5 years. But that he was all about the users needs and not himself is not something I think the facts bear out.

[hgs3]

> The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not.

A good follow up question is why not make CD Baby a non-profit instead of for-profit? Being a non-profit foundation would telegraph to everyone, including future leadership, where their priorities should lie.

[twobitshifter]

jobs talking about exactly that with regards to Xerox. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM

[rpgmaker]

You don't hate to deify Jobs since you just made a completely unnecessary and off topic deification of him.

[jfengel]

It helps that CDBaby was handling a lot of stuff that musicians didn't want to do themselves. They were happy to outsource it. If the alternative were easy, people would already have done it.

That wasn't what CDBaby lost to. They lost to the fact that CDs disappeared. CDBaby had a great business, removing a pain point, and they could genuinely want that pain point to go away entirely.

Such are the best possible businesses, genuinely caring about your customers while having enough moat to avoid being undercut tomorrow. Not all businesses can do that, regardless of the best intentions of management.

[benwaffle]

I think today CDBaby is one of the most popular ways to release your music to all of the major streaming platforms. I wouldn't call that "lost".

[gmiller123456]

This isn't intended to reflect on any particular business owner. But I have yet to hear any business owner announce "We are totally motivated by greed, and will screw over our customers and partners to make money". Elizabeth Holmes said a lot of touchy-feely stuff. So I wouldn't put much weight in what any business owner says about their motivation.

[mattgreenrocks]

Lots of business owners end up treating their businesses as their kids in the sense that they see them as extensions of themselves primarily, rather than their own thing. This, of course, is deeply narcissistic and hurts everyone in the vicinity.

[godelski]

> What if every musician just set up their own store on their own website?

Can anyone imagine the hell that would be "every musician setting up their own website?" Centralization offers a lot of benefits to the users. I can buy CDs of multiple artists at the same time. I can find similar artists (there's a natural competition here). None of this one password per artist. There's a reduced security risk for me buying from a centralized service (just need to trust one site instead of hundreds, and specifically small artists that might not know things). I definitely would not have answered that question so well.

[brazzy]

> Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good service? It's all about them, not you.

If you good-service yourself into being unprofitable and eventually bankrupt, it's not good for yourself and eventually your customers as well.

[hypertele-Xii]

Good business provides value to customers.

Bad business extracts value from customers.