Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

"Go big or go home". This seems to be a uniquely north-American attitude. Germany, or maybe Europe, is full of so-called "Mittelstand" companies that are good in what they do, have 500-ish employees, have been in the same family ownership for generations and provide a good solid living for everyone involved. What is wrong with that? It goes without saying that staying mid-sized doesn't mean staying complacent, but you can innovate without growing huge.

Here in Ottawa, there was a debacle a few years ago. A typical such company, Swiss Pastries, changed ownership or at least management. The new attitude was "grow at all costs", they overextended themselves, went bankrupt, and Swiss Pastries is no more. Ottawa now has no local source of soft pretzels along with other delicacies that they made. It's almost a scorched earth approach. If you can't make the company huge, you might as well destroy it, because not being huge means you've failed.

The previous paragraph is based on reading a few news articles at the time. If I'm wrong, I'm guessing it still makes a textbook example of "go big or go home" going wrong and I'd love to see more details.

I worked for 27 years, for a company (Japanese) that is over 100 years old. It is world-renowned, and one of the top brands in the world; a synonym for "Quality."

I won't name it, because I don't want them to have to deal with my random stuff (although I won't say bad things about them). It's easy to figure out, if you care enough to look at my profile.

Although I often had fierce disagreements with their management and engineering process, these folks had "Quality" in their DNA, and inculcated a basic mindset of quality in me.

To this day, I actually get physically uncomfortable, if I know of bugs in my work. My goal is to write 100% bug-free software. We all know that's basically impossible, but it is possible to write software of such Quality, that the bug count approaches zero. In most cases, I don't bother setting up bug tracking systems, because the reports are so few that it's not worth the agita. GitHub Issues is fine for me. Most of the interactions that I have are about usability and UX. These tend to be more casual, and "back-and-forth," than formal bug reports.

I have been sneered at for this attitude.

I find that annoying, but it doesn't stop me.

I'm currently working on a fairly ambitious project, where my approach is very much appreciated. I would be unable to do it, if I applied the typical "churn out crap to reach MVP" that seems to be de rigeur, in the industry. The Quality of my work, means that I can develop a platform, alone, that usually requires a team.

> is growth always good?

Perhaps we are glossing over the real question:

> is the pursuit of growth always good?

And perhaps even more accurately:

> is a strategy of not pursuing growth better for a company?

I think this might lead to a more relevant discussion than is happening elsewhere in this thread.

Besides--"perpetual growth" as a concept is on the same plane as "the customer is always right." It's not expected to be literally true, it's a mindset. If you're not trying to improve, you're likely stagnating or getting worse. If you're consistently at-odds with what your customer is expecting, it may mean you should be re-assessing how you're doing business.

I think ultimately it is healthy for businesses to be constantly re-evaluating whether they can do more, or do it for less. And that's all "perpetual growth" means.

> There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.

All this demand for software and ever changing needs, and more cloud computing environment is coming from somewhere. You want to know where?

Merely 2 decades ago, the average household had one computer in the house, and it was typically a desktop, and the adults and teenagers had had cellphones.

Now, almost everyone that is middle class or above has multiple computing devices in their possession at all times. Every member of the family has their own laptop or tablet and cellphone, probably even a smartwatch or two, even kids as young as 4. There's probably multiple TV screens and gaming consoles as well. Devices that are designed to be replaced in a mere 2-3 years through planned obsolesce. We have more cheap shit than ever before and it gets thrown in the trash at an ever increasing rate. There are screens literally everywhere now: My gas station pump, the wine and beer isle at my grocery store, at the checkout line, walking out into the parking lot, on my wrist, in my pocket, at my coffee shop, in my restaurants.

That results in more companies needing to have digital presences, more apps, more games, more features, more data collection and spyware tracking you around the internet, more ML models being trained and draining energy, more crypto-mining and 4,000 watt PSU's coming online, so on and so forth.

All this stuff requires an ever increasing amount of rare earth materials and burned fossil fuels to produce and operate.

That thought that continued growth is eventually unsustainable has been there since at least the 1840's. The core of Marxism is the idea that capitalism is the most effective method of increasing productive capacity, and that this is fantastic (the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is fanboy-level praise for capitalism), until it runs out of room to grow into.

Whether or not you agree with the analysis, the core problem it posits - that capitalism will grow out of markets to expand into, and that once it does, it will fundamentally change the game - matters.

We can necessarily not have growth forever - if not before, eventually we run out of exploitable energy within our light-cone. In practice we'll hit limits far sooner that will cause competition to drive down production cost will be far harsher than it needs to be in an environment where you can compensate by expansion.

Marx thought that would happen "soon" - when capitalism has spread to the entire world. But it's a question when, not if, we hit a ceiling where further demand growth can't physically happen, and quite likely we'll reach a ceiling long before there where it's not happening fast enough to counter competitive pressure. The world population is expected to stabilise and start dropping - at least for a while - possibly as soon as towards the end of this century. What happens to growth then?

Whenever we reach a point where capitalism is no longer getting growth by growing into expanding markets, the question becomes whether capitalist competition will drive us to a level of automation that threatens to kill capitalism. Marx believed that would happen by causing crises of "overproduction", where improved efficiency would cause mass unemployment and by extension kneecap demand by taking away peoples incomes. Alternatively, whether we'll be able to as a society reign things in and ensure people share in enough of the improvements in efficiency for capitalism to survive - be it with UBI, or shortening working hours, or other means.

Because it's easy to forget that one of the "promises" of capitalist competitive pressure is to drive margins towards zero, because a company that can survive with lower margins can out-compete one that can't. And ultimately that means driving every cost that can be reduced down, and that means ultimately driving labour costs down as far as they can go...