I saw a theory from another lemmy user a while back that made a lot of sense. Basically shareholders get to a point where the want cash now. So they make a deal with the current CEO to do something shitty for short term profits. The shareholders get paid in the short term and then once the share price takes a hit they buy more shares at a discount. They then fire the current CEO who takes a nice exit fee and install someone else to do damage control and grow the stock price again. This is the only thing that makes sense to me because the alternative is that the current CEO is just actually that dumb.

It's the infinite growth bullshit that every publicly traded company suffers from. They're making enough money, but with capitalism it's never enough...

For me the problem is that the shareholders are putting enormous pressure on publicly traded companies requiring ever lasting exponential growth.

Back then I posted a thread about why I think publicly traded companies are bad for our society, as an unpopular opinion and I got severely downvoted, but hey isn't this another example for the latter?

This SaaS model was born exactly out of this and it is the worst offender.

Back then we were able to own our own software/hardware, now everything is leasing and perpetual paying for things you need/use everyday. Thank God we have foss apps that in most cases are better alternatives.