Of course not, because a company that strikes the perfect balance of being sorta-in-the-right-direction but then also using deliberately deceptive language to pretend they're all-the-way-in-the-right-direction is going to outcompete companies that genuinely go all the way.
That's a fair statement but as long as a company is not found to be applying bias to their application of their rules, again I see no problem. In the instances we're discussing though, there has been clear violation of terms over a sustained period of time.
>I'd say selectively presenting one side is dishonest.
do you vote with your dollars in this regard?
If there was a bigger PR penalty for not revealing unpleasant truths and maybe more support for a company that does reveal unpleasant truths about itself, more companies would be more open.
I would say it does matter if a company benefits more than I do, but makes out like it doesn't. Any fair transaction should surely balance? In the end, nobody likes being deceived or presented with false information, even happy customers.
Yes, it is naive to expect businesses not to tell lies and to refrain from representing other people's ideas as their own. But it is also naive to expect people not to complain about it.
Perhaps in theory. In practice, some companies manage to do less badly than others.
It's not necessarily even a contradiction, if your primary business is selling to consumers it's entirely reasonable that a company would want to keep a positive image going.
For a company that makes earth-moving equipment primarily purchased by strip mining operations, no one would question the business sense of them not donating a percentage of their profits to environmental protest organizations.
For a company that sells to some gamer demographic, perhaps it would be the better part of wisdom to, say, decline to antagonize the likes of Geohot and the noncommercial hackers, modders, and Linux users of their platform. (Never mind the legally questionable tactic of retroactively disabling previously advertised and purchased functionality).
Yes but its hard to plug your company by saying:
"we do X like everyone else, but trust me: we have this"
but easy with:
"we don't do X, we do X' because these bad things happen with X".
Particularly if X, or things that have been labeled X have been cause for concern.
Such trival considerations as X' == X don't always get the attention they deserve, as seeing this requires an amount of understanding of the problem and not just the fustrations of using X.
*insert generic engineer gripe at how common it is that the people making the purchasing decisions - the target of marketing - don't have said amount of insight.
We can have a debate about whether "industry norms" are fair or not, and that's an interesting conversation to have. But your stake there is well below industry norms.
Speaking from experience, just because you work for a company doesn't mean you can use all of their products (or that you'll even get favorable pricing on them).
I'm not in favor of public scaremongering like spreading half-truths about a random other company on a billboard, but I will say that perfect is the enemy of good. You can say "sort out your own back yard" about virtually anything.
If you believe that what they do is good, it doesn't matter so much if their own back yard is sorted out, it's still good. If you don't, then not, and it still doesn't matter what their own state of affairs looks like.
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