@Ace Dragon: The thing is for a corporation sometimes it only appears as though they’re putting the bottom line above users when those at the helm are thinking more about the future. You know they say it takes money to make money and from a business standpoint I think sometimes a company finds themselves in an environment where they have to push out some overpriced cheap crap in order to shore up the funding for something better later down the line.
It’s certainly not the most desirable of situations a business can find themselves in, but they’ve gotta do what they’ve gotta do to stay alive. This is really the type of situation you find coming out of markets with fierce competition, those markets that are largely or virtually monopolized usually just put the bottom line above users plain and simple because they can get away with doing it consistently.
As for putting ideology above users. I think this is a different realm entirely because we’re talking about ethics here and really a major part of ethics is sticking with them not only when it’s easy, but especially when it’s tough. This means aligning with your ethical views whenever there’s a choice between your ethics and essentially anything other than. So when you’ve got users demanding something of you that requires something that falls outside of your ethical alignment then you must choose your ethics above the users otherwise not call yourself ethical.
The choice as to whether one desires to be ethical or not is, like any other, a choice that belongs solely to the individual and I’m not saying that it is good or bad to choose one path or the other, simply pointing out what I believe to be true. Important to note, though, that it is only what I believe to be true, meaning it is not necessarily true.
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” -Mahatma Gandhi
P.S. One of the interesting things about ethics is that one could be one of the most heartless and ruthless businessmen and still be considered ethical if what he does aligns with his personal ethics. Just being ethical doesn’t necessarily denote someone is some type of saint because ethics are relative to their respective owner.
If one chooses to be ethical they must take care to be mindful. The mind can play tricks on itself, one of the pitfalls here is that the mind sometimes tries to trick itself into believing it is taking ethical actions when in fact it is not. It is all too often that a person is their own greatest enemy, they will lie to themselves and twist their own reality so as to avoid seeing a truth they wish so not to see. This is, in my belief, not particularly evil, but instead it is the brain trying to avoid pain.
