Yes. But when you're driven by the idea of exit striving towards such things becomes ultra focused. Put another way, exit is the ultimate recognition that these purpose(s) have been acheived.
Look at the corporate raiders of the 1980s. Firing people, loading up a company with debt. And taking them bankrupt makes a ton of money for private equity. No product required, immensely profitable!
If you're licensing a patent to others with reasonable terms, it's not a patent troll.
I understand you think they provide a service since you seem to not understand what a patent troll is.
As a reminder, a patent troll company is a company "that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll)
They don't sell any services, don't do any (reasonable) licensing, nor provide any goods.
Patent trolling is not a company category, rather a behavior of a company. Furthermore patents themselves are goods that can be licensed, so my point stands.
Not to mention “trolling” is already passing judgement on the activity to begin with. The actual service is licensing. I’ll leave it to the courts to determine whether enforcement of patents qualifies as trolling or not.
Oh I'm sorry. I meant to say "Patent Trolling Companies", is it easier to understand now?
I'm sure you are aware that there actually is a category of companies that just participate in "patent trolling", and do nothing else. Not sure why you're being so pedantic about the grammar instead of trying to reply to the actual arguments...
Seems like if you've only come up with patent trolls, then "plenty of companies" doesn't apply. Patent trolls weaponise the legal system against other companies. They exist because the government can't make a good enough patent system.
They don't seem to be significant enough to the overall general statement that companies exist to serve their customers with goods and/or services.
> I'm not sure how valuable it is to argue with someone who cannot read two messages up in the message hierarchy...
Do you mean the one you mentioned 4 messages up? And dropped with this?
> Ok, lets hear you argue for what service a patent troll provides.
Sure - the one you dropped was domain flipping. Clearly buying something at a certain price and then selling it again is not nothing - that's why people pay for it. Just like house flipping. Or just buying anything speculatively. I assume you realised that, and dropped it for that reason.
Look at the corporate raiders of the 1980s. Firing people, loading up a company with debt. And taking them bankrupt makes a ton of money for private equity. No product required, immensely profitable!
Depends on your worldview. Historically, companies had a purpose first and profit second. You needed approval by the crown before you were allowed to start a company. Then, once your company fit the purpose as seen by the crown, you were allowed to make profit with it.
That has changed, especially since the 80s, where the prevalent world view turned to "let's have the market figure out purpose", which equates to anything that is profitable is good.
We've since learned that this isn't automatically true (as exemplified in this abandoned merger, for example), and my understanding is that right now there's no clear opinion in society whether profit or purpose comes first in companies.
When there are elected officials who say that maybe capitalism is more important than democracy, it becomes clear that consensus is going to be difficult to achieve.
Why do you say that, and how does it work? Are you making a completely different statement than the point the parent was making? Sure you usually need to sell something in order to get the profit, but that doesn’t mean that the good or service or it’s quality was prioritized above getting any profit, which is what I think parent was talking about.
Generally speaking, private non-subsidized companies that offer goods and services for sale cannot actually survive without any profit, right? They can bootstrap for a while with investment, but they tend to die, statistically speaking, if they prioritize goods and services over profit. The way companies tend to survive death is by doing everything they can to ensure that the sale of their goods or services generates a profit. You might also be temporarily forgetting that it’s also incredibly common for companies to pivot on what products they make and sell whenever they’re not making enough profit.
TBH it actually seems really funny to me argue about which comes first, because the kind of company we’re talking about needs both, it doesn’t otherwise exist. But the idea parent shared, that profit takes the highest priority, is often absolutely true in practice, many companies will do everything they can to avoid not making a profit, from lowering the quality of their goods and services, to coming up with other more profitable products, to merging with another company that has more customers for your product and/or a longer runway.
