Greed in itself is not necessarily evil. Greed leads to some very wonderful things. Greed is the major driver behind most research and development. Greed begets innovation. Greed results in people coming up with more efficient ways to do things. If there was no hope for making more money than I spend to develop the next new thing, most folks wouldn’t bother. Greed drives everything from the search for the cure to cancer to the development of your next mobile phone. Unfortunately, there are some people that push the limits of ethics and legality, and those incidents stand out in our collective consciousness. Fortunately, the vast majority of managers recognize that it is just good business to stay well within the bounds of what is legally, morally, and ethically right.

I think conceptually, when we apply greed to a corporation it becomes evil but then ask yourself why you go to work every day if not to come home tonight with more money in your pocket than you had this morning, is it really that different? If it cost you more to go to work than they paid you, you’d quit in a heartbeat.

Corporations aren’t the big faceless entities that you see on the surface. A huge chunk of the shareholders are pension funds, mutual funds, and so on. In reality, Acme Corp is your neighbor who is saving for retirement. He’s entrusted his hard earned money under the hope that he’ll get more back someday. Would you deposit cash in a savings account if you got a negative return? Would you be pissed off if you trusted someone with your money and they turned down a good offer because they wanted to stay in charge? As long as that choice was legal, moral, ethical, and the most profitable option in the long run, I’d be at the gates with pitchfork and torches if the management was acting in their own best interests instead of mine.

Many times I’ve been a fan of the thing that’s on the losing end of that business decision, but I get it. Granted, when it involves things like medicine and the social responsibility therein, or the arts and the dilemma imposed by financial compensation influencing the creative process, it starts to get more complicated. As consumers, we often feel jilted when our favorite band accepts a new recording contract on the terms that they play a different musical style, or when our favorite game starts to morph into something different than the thing we fell in love with. It sucks when that happens and we come to face with the realization that as a professional recording artist, he’s just trying to make a living (or perhaps his musical tastes evolved and we still like his old sound) and it sucks to be reminded that Blizzard is a business that exists to serve its owners, not a charity to serve its users. Thankfully, in this case we’re talking about an entertainment industry and not debating a pharmaceutical company profiting off of the pain and suffering of humanity.

What I don’t think will last is Zynga games, ie Farmville and Mafia Wars.

So we may be hitting Peak WoW. Soon something else will come along, and WOW will be the next Ultima Online or EQ2, still with a small player base, but not nearly the glory of the early years.

Activision/Kotick + FB + Blizz = A very wary customer over here.

The nice thing with Captialism is that someone else can always come along and still our loyalty away, until they get so big and repeat the cycle.

To me the entire Facebook game, Zynga thing, feels more like the dot com era. I just don’t see it lasting much longer. The dot com businesses were advertising on TV and in 7/11 just like Zynga is doing but they all nearly fizzeled out. I personally don’t feel that Zynga’s business model is sustainable.