If a company actually satisfied its customer, it would go out of business, because those costumer would have no reason to come back. When business types talk about satisfied consumers, they don't mean permanently satisfied, they mean satisfaction in the way of a junkie who's just got a "fix" - Crack is a good consumer product, Utopia is not.
If the goal of business was about actually doing its job, instead of making money, the world's products and lifestyles would be greater than anything we can imagine - but the only way to get business to do its job is to get rid of capitalism. The art of capitalism is to addict, to satisfy only as much as a drug "fix" satisfies a junkie.
"According to [capitalists], if an industry or an institution is making a profit, it is satisfying "wants" whose origins and content are deliberately disregarded. But what we want, what we are capable of wanting is relative to the forms of social organization.
People "want" fast food because they have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn't taste much better anyway, because the nuclear family (for the dwindling minority who have even that to go home to) is too small and too stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating -- and so forth. It is only people who can't get what they want who resign themselves to want more of what they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail for more candy." --Bob Black, Smokestack Lightning
"When the oranges grow golden, the doctor's face grows pale" - The Japanese version of "an apple a day keeps the doctor away"
It is not in the self-interest of arms manufacturers to pursue world peace. Repairmen would be unemployed if everything got permanently fixed. Luckily, the businesses that would suffer the worst from this phenomenon are nationalized - Ie, the police. If they were seeking profit, low crime would drive them out of business. Fire fighters would have to moonlight as arsonists. The army would not take very much time with diplomacy. Hospitals would sabotage your insides the same way car mechanics loosen screws under the hood.
There's a new kind of computer monitor, which is only visible if you're sitting directly in front of it. If you're a little off to the side, it just looks grey. The idea, claim users, is that nobody can steal corporate information, like new brow-nosing tactics or top secret water cooler rumours. Seems more likely to me that these monitors are selling mainly to businessmen who want to look busy while they're downloading porn...There's a whole industry out there (radar detectors on cars is another example) where capitalism supplies both sides of an absurd struggle, with the net gain being nothing for society (but plenty for the profiteer). There's something funny about ever-so-efficient capitalism building high-efficiency productivity killers...(Kind of makes you wonder if makers of anti-virus software or antibiotics actually look forward to the day when viruses etc. are wiped out...Just think about repairmen who sabotage things so that they'll be needed again...Or manufacturers who made fancy bomb shelters as consumer items - how committed do you think they would be to world peace? Or what about arms makers, for that matter?)
Air bags are well designed, capitalistically speaking. They protect from head on collisions - ie, those mainly caused by the driver, but not from side collisions - ie, those caused by somebody else. And of course, it does nothing to protect pedestrians, but it allows dangerously reckless and incompetent people a false sense of security. Genius.