Comment by yourapostasy

A current rough rule of thumb I currently use: if private equity buys out a company I'm using, I bail for the next best competitor within a couple years. If it is a US private equity firm, within a year.

There are exceptions. It isn't hard though these days to look up the firms' histories and then look up customer conversations on the Net about those historical portco's. More importantly, it isn't hard to look up the people behind the private equity firms (though I find it harder to link specific partners with specific portco's), and avoid the ones you see with a track record you want to dissociate from. Before the Net, this kind of research took days to assemble in libraries. With the Net and LLM's, it is very fast.

Remember capitalism is a tool that is supposed to cut both ways, both for the producer and for the consumer. Simultaneously.