> Is it "improper" to maximize profit per their own board's guidelines?
From the standpoint of the end user the incentives are improperly aligned. If they had made hammers they would have included licence agreements for their use with specific types of nails and actively prevented users from using competitor's nails. They also would have made sure yesterday's hammer would not be sufficient to hammer in today's nail, they would have added camera's to observe what the user was doing so as to sell 'targeted' advertising - during which the hammer would not strike any nails but would sing like the singing sword in Who Framed Roger Rabbit - and they would have made sure that no matter how agile the user was with his hammer the thing would never be 100% reliable.
Of course hammers are far less complex than computers and operating systems. Maybe this is because they're made by tool manufacturers and not by tech companies, maybe it is because they're old tech. A modern hammer is what Ford would have produced if he had listened to his customers who asked him for a faster horse so maybe there is a whole world of construction efficiency waiting for the Henry Ford of Hammersmiths. Or, maybe - probably - sometimes it is better to get that faster horse, that titanium hammer or that free software operating system which works for you and nobody else.
From the standpoint of the end user the incentives are improperly aligned. If they had made hammers they would have included licence agreements for their use with specific types of nails and actively prevented users from using competitor's nails. They also would have made sure yesterday's hammer would not be sufficient to hammer in today's nail, they would have added camera's to observe what the user was doing so as to sell 'targeted' advertising - during which the hammer would not strike any nails but would sing like the singing sword in Who Framed Roger Rabbit - and they would have made sure that no matter how agile the user was with his hammer the thing would never be 100% reliable.
Of course hammers are far less complex than computers and operating systems. Maybe this is because they're made by tool manufacturers and not by tech companies, maybe it is because they're old tech. A modern hammer is what Ford would have produced if he had listened to his customers who asked him for a faster horse so maybe there is a whole world of construction efficiency waiting for the Henry Ford of Hammersmiths. Or, maybe - probably - sometimes it is better to get that faster horse, that titanium hammer or that free software operating system which works for you and nobody else.