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Originally Posted by HarryT
In a capitalist society, isn't it the goal of every company to monopolise its market sector and discourage competition? A company's goal - in fact its legal obligation - is to make money for its shareholders, not to be "nice" to its customers! If being "nice" helps to win it business, then that may be a part of its business strategy, but one should never make the mistake of thinking that a large company exists to "make the world a better place".
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I mostly agree with HarryT... When I worked at Texas Instruments (in their DSP division) their stated goal was to ethically out-compete the other DSP vendors so successfully that they were investigated by the Justice Department as a possible monopoly. Of course, Justice wouldn't find anything actionable because they were going to do it in a completely fair and above-board manner -- by making better products and selling them for more attractive prices. Note: no irony in that statement. That's literally what they said.
The idea was that trouncing the competition by doing a better job than they do provides benefit to society as well as to the company (and it's shareholders), where monopolistically cheating only benefits the company. That's a business strategy that happens to lead to a social good -- but it's still primarily a
business decision, not a social one.
In selling this idea internally, they emphasized that good business ethics was both "the right way" to do things (for the moralists in the crowd) and that it was "smart business tactics" for the "greed is good" part of the crowd.
Xenophon