> “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”

https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve...

Reputation is an asset like anything else. It's probably economically rational to build up a reputation for good quality while you're small, and then switch to extracting as much value as you can from that reputation once you've gotten big. (I don't like it but I don't see any way to prevent it being the most profitable course)

Normalisation of Deviance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o

Perhaps another take on this:

  Hard times create strong people
  strong people create good times
  good times create weak people
  weak people create hard times

Obviously that's not some magic rule or anything, but people shape their surroundings, then the surroundings shape their people. When played out across generations (or multiple phases of ownership at a company, as in your comment), cycles often form.

Hewlett-Packard

I feel like this is ameliorated somewhat by having the original founder at the helm?

Of course that’s not a guarantee either as they’re liable to take a few billion and run off into the sunset.

I don't follow your logical jump from (3) to (4).

Cost-cutting is always unpleasant, and never done just for fun. Typically companies cut costs when they're feeling squeezed, i.e. they have to.

A company with a "mini monopoly" would not feel squeezed - quite the opposite.

Enshittification?

It is a bit more nuanced:

4.1 Company starts to talk about politics instead of products in their marketing campaigns

4.2 Company starts to cut cost on workforce by pushing out experienced people and hiring cheap newbies

4.3 As a result of the previous one, expertise drops rapidly and product quality starts to drop

4.4 As the product quality decreases, bleeding experienced people makes it impossible to stabilize

4.5 There is nobody left to innovate. The cafeteria manager is the best path to become an IT director (real case: 3 consecutive cafeteria managers in the same office were promoted as IT directors in one of these companies), so the best expertise the management has is to pick the right beverages for the automated vending machines in the office

4.6 Principles and values disappear, corruptions grows, while internal controls don't even bother to look into frauds less than $1 million per incident

4.7 stock price drops, even if the company continuously spends money on shares buybacks