It seems like most of the successful corporations go through two stages:
1) The growth stage. This is the stage where the corporation tries to get users for their product. They do so by being good to their customers, and focusing on quality, and keeping their prices competitive. The objective of this stage is to increase their number of customers - profits are secondary.
2) The milking stage. Once their customer-base is saturated, and they have a large number of people dependent on them, then they start screwing over their customers in order to maximize the amount of wealth they extract from them. They raise their prices, and no one can do anything about it because everyone is dependent on them. They also will just generally treat their customers badly if doing so will benefit the corporation in the smallest way. They have the market cornered at this point so all that matters is maximizing the wealth they extract per customer.
A couple of examples are:
Google was in the growth stage until probably the late 2000s. They really seemed like a cool, innovative company, and they kept coming out with quality products. And they were good to their customers, with YouTube being basically completely free speech. But Google has been in the milking stage for the last decade or so, and so they now treat their customers like garbage.
Facebook had a very short growth stage. In the early days, around 2008, Facebook had an excellent interface. It was clear to everyone that it was vastly superior to MySpace, which at that point was unresponsive, ugly, and unusable crap. But once Facebook took over the social networking market, they stopped caring about the quality of their interface, and instead just invested all their resources into developing ways to more efficiently invade the privacy of their customers for profit.
I think there is lots of money that can be made by buying companies when they are in the growth stage, so that they will appreciate once they enter the milking stage.
What are some companies in the growth stage? A couple that I think are in the growth stage are:
Does anyone else know of any other companies in the growth stage? I.e., companies that deliver high quality products for low prices in order to increase their userbase?
there doesn't seem to be anything here