Usually when corporations do things, the public reasons given are just a perception management issue. When you do find out how the sausage got made, you realize there is a lack of exceptional people in the corporate world. You just get more signs of the general corporate quality collapse going on.
During the 90s, the smartest kids in college tended to go into Computer Engineering/Science as a way to escape the matrix (via the booming salaries in that industry). The rest of the professional classes suffered an IQ drop among their new recruits (found an exceptional doctor lately?). These days, you get into PE/Finance to escape the matrix because tech wages have been suppressed via offshoring and the H1B program. If you want to quickly buy a house in a safe neighborhood without help from your parents, that was what you were looking at back then and now. There is a brain drain in all the professional classes by people scrambling on whatever will get them out of debt fastest so they can buy a few acres and check out.
This isn’t how the sorting hat should work in the heart of the empire. I think the brain drain is so bad, that we have a political class whose staffers are generally not capable of mentally simulating second order consequences or how to run an empire. If they were capable, we’d fix this broken system with the efficiency of the gilded age.
No offense to anyone in the tobacco industry, but I used to have cloud bills larger and probably more complex than what was paid for MacBaren/Sutliff. The small batch complexity is not that hard to manage. We have these things called computers now that help smart people manage complexity. Ultimately, the final prognosis is that a few thousand skus are dying to the same corporate degeneration and asset stripping trends going on in many other sectors.
Cheers,
Ken, techbro CTO of a boutique data science company
and sole proprietor of Ken Byron Ventures