[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by ApK

That's fundamentally wrong. Companies are run by people who make decisions. Those decisions can be good or bad, or even evil.

Those people's decisions can be, yes, but they're definable people, not "the company" as people (pro or con) talk about Apple. You can argue that Steve Jobs is good or evil (and no, I'm not going to give my opinion). But he does not have sole control of Apple, nor could he decide, at least for very long, to take actions that were contrary to the best interests of the stockholders and the board.

A company can make money by serving the best interests of their customers and doing good work for their communities, or they can make money by breaking safety laws, and dumping poisons into the water supply.

Serving the best interests of their customers does not make any money at all for a company; it costs them money. Companies treat that much like an advertising expense: if they spend X amount on looking good to the community, it will bring in Y in profits. Any given company has a number of ways to look good to its customers. It could support the local high school band. It could sponsor a sporting event (with, of course, its name on it). It could buy advertising telling people how great it is. Which one they choose comes down to which one they think is most likely to bring in the best return on investment. And that has nothing to do with the best interests of their customers, and everything to do with the numbers from their accountants.

As for dumping poisons into the water supply ... so, prior to the passage of environmental protection laws, were companies more or less evil than they are today? And how did the existence of those laws change the fundamental nature of the companies?

Legal is not good, and illegal is not evil. If Apple violates some provision of Sarbanes-Oxley, let's say, do they become evil because they broke the law? Was General Electric's dumping of toxic waste into the Hudson River prior to the laws against doing so a good act? Would this be specific to location? For example, is the wage Apple pays (through intermediaries) the people who assemble its products good (because it's legal in China) or bad (because it's illegal in the US)?

...it's perfectly legitimate and potentially effective to tell a company 'we like your products, but if you don't change your policies, THEN we will shop elsewhere.'

Of course it is. And a company can decide that having your business will bring them more profit than changing their policies will lose them, or that their existing policies bring them more profit than losing your business will cost. Corporations make decisions like that all the time. Good and evil, though, don't enter into it.

If you think that a pure profit motive, and a focus on legality (or paying the price of illegality) instead of moral rectitude, is evil, then every public corporation is evil. Every company that says "it's cheaper to pay the fines than obey the law" is evil. Every company that says "it's not illegal in that country, so we'll do it there" is evil. And, for that matter, every company that coldly, cynically advertises how their toothpaste will get you laid is, again, evil. Maximizing profits is the whole point (and in fact the legal obligation) of a corporation. But Apple is no more or less evil than any of the rest of them, which neither the Apple lovers nor the Apple haters seem to get.