Comment by rdtsc
2 months ago
> Just looking at the Meta article: The article cites "pressure from conservative critics and customers" as the reason, not financial performance. The Meta representative was quoted pointing to "legal and policy landscape" changes. Nothing about if or how the initiative affected the company's bottom line.
Of course they won't say it doesn't work. They'll cite external pressure or other reason. But they get pressure from customers for privacy and other issues, yet that doesn't phase them much. So if they saw clear advantage to the policy, say it just improved their bottom line, stock price, etc, they would have easily brushed away the "pressure" and said "sorry, we're here to make a profit and this makes us a profit, tough luck".
If the real reason these companies dropped the policies was that they were unprofitable, and their bottom lines showed it, then why did they wait until exactly November 2024 to all drop them at once? Surely they could have discovered this many quarters ago. Did the policies just suddenly become unprofitable right as the next political administration was decided? Why would company directors across entire industries just sit there nodding their heads, as you say, voluntarily not making more profit for shareholders? It doesn't seem like the bottom line was the real reason in this case.
They couldn't drop it as it would have affected their ESG rating, which impacts the ability to get loans and raise capital, etc.
They may have feared the negative PR of dropping the policies would be more costly than the policies themselves.