Earlier quoted context omitted.
(In the following, we will stipulate that your "rogue programmer disrupts Photoshop, resulting in a better product and getting half of Adobe fired" situation is plausible, for the sake of illustration.) The half of Adobe you posit getting sacked wouldn't say it was worth it, though, and from a certain perspective -- namely, their own -- they'd be right. After all, Photoshop is already the unquestioned leader in its f…
I disagree that it is morally wrong to threaten people's livelihoods, or that anything is morally permissible to defend one's own livelihood. If, by some crazy chance, someone managed to make my job unnecessary, I would just suck it up and get a different job. I would suggest reading some General Equilibrium theory, which explains why making someone's job unnecessary is actually a good thing overall, even though it m…
If you re-read my comment, you may notice that I never mentioned morality. That's because morality has no place in tactical analysis. Clutter your consideration with irrelevant philosophizing if you so please; the only effect it can have is to cloud your appreciation of the matter, which at the very least will certainly redound to your detriment. (At most, it will also redound to the detriment of others.)
The point of the exercise, after all, is to illustrate how everyone acts in defense of his own interests, insofar as he's able to identify and further them. There are subtleties; for example, engineers often identify so strongly with an employer as to mistake its interests for their own. But whether someone accurately recognizes his interests or not, he'll still act, as best he's able, to further whatever he believes his interests to be.
It will thus never help you, in understanding how a given person is likely to behave in a given situation, to waste time on whether you think a given action right or wrong. That won't affect his behavior, so there's no reason it should affect your prediction of same. (Whether he thinks a given action right or wrong, as for example if he believes it in his interest to behave in accord with a concept of morality favoring altruism, does matter, of course. But that's something which you can predict, given sufficient observation and analysis.)
For the same reason, considering how you expect you would act in a given situation, or even how you actually would act in that situation, won't reliably help you appreciate how anyone else is likely to behave. You're you. No one else is. Factoring yourself into your analysis of someone else, then, only adds useless noise.
Economics, too, is a branch of philosophy. It will not help you here. Perhaps you propose to explain to someone that your actions, placing a vital part of his life in danger of upheaval, is actually a good thing, or that it's "...a good thing overall, even though it might harm that person." Having so amazingly presumed, no doubt you'll be astonished when it does nothing to placate your interlocutor. Engineers, after all, are often embarrassingly incompetent when it comes to interacting sensibly with other people.
But all of this overlooks the fundamental handicap you evince, which is the inability to differentiate between a philosophical exercise and a tactical one. The former can be a diverting pastime, perhaps even on occasion a valuable one. The latter, effectively pursued, will show you ways to preserve your position and achieve your goals -- and also enable you, should you so desire, to help others preserve and achieve theirs. Ineffectively pursued, or worse not pursued at all, it will have the opposite effect.
Perhaps this seems cold to you. Reality's like that. But consider: technology is applied science, and science is systematized knowledge. What I describe to you here, admittedly in very general and ill-formalized terms, is simply a means by which to develop, systematize, and apply knowledge in the realm of interpersonal relationships. As with any technology, whether it's "right" or "wrong", "good" or "evil", depends entirely on how you constitute those categories and how you employ the technology at hand; no morality inheres.
Perhaps, too, you prefer a diet of pablum to one of red meat. It's your lookout either way; I freely concede that, were it not to my benefit in helping me refine my (as yet still rather inchoate) understanding of the subject, I wouldn't be engaging in this discussion at all. If it's to your benefit as well, good for you! If not, well, that's your problem, isn't it? I may be named for a priest, but I've long since abandoned any pretensions to being a redeemer.