I think that's only part of the issue. IMO, the bigger problem is the executives at large companies are incentivized to produce short term results. If they do, they get a huge bonus. Often times, their salary is small and the bonus makes up 90% or more of their pay.


>The ownership model. A privately owned company, small to medium sized, is human sized and there are not too many, if any, degrees of separation between the customer and the owner, owner and workers, sales and production, production and tech support. In many cases the owner knows most of them personally, has met them face to face, has a relationship with them and is aware that those relationships are his bread and butter, and strives to keep them for the future.
>
>A large corporation, OTOH, is owned by anonymous stock owners, who generally don't know anybody in it, have a 0.0001 stake in it (or less) and have dozens of such stakes in other places, some of them possibly direct competitors to each other. The sales and production are frequently at odds - the last engineer who wanted to have some pride in the product's quality was fired long ago and replaced with one who'll build whatever is thought as sellable, quality and expected lifetime of the product be damned. Tech support has never seen production, they learn the product from textbooks. The board of directory may have people who also never saw production, and may not even know where exactly all of it is. As the end result, they (large corporations) don't really try to build a lasting relationship with anybody - the workers can be replaced, executives bought, and any decision which may impact the customers is weighed in terms of net profit vs net loss - we'll lose this many on which we made this amount of money, but we'll get that many on the other side, and we'll earn that much, net difference of 2% will make us look good on the stock market and we can just exercise our options and all go fishing.
>
>In short, little shop cares about you (as in "can't really afford to lose you"), big corporation doesn't.