alt Hacker NewsStockholder value is now predicated entirely on things like recurring revenue, growth, and MBA short-term profit seeking. Enshittification of existing SaaS and 'smart' products is a feature, not a bug.
Unless something drastically changes in the US stock market, any publicly traded technology company of significant size is basically mandated to prostrate themselves to the altar of fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.
Stockholder value isn't the only metric that matters.
A hardware purchase occurs once, it doesn't come due for extracting or manipulating every quarter.