Each fiscal quarter, companies want to make more and more profit. If they aren't making more profit, they see it as a failure.

Eventually, a point is reached where you can't raise the price of your product or service any more without people leaving. You're draining your customers for everything they have, but you're still just barely beating out last quarter's profits.

So in desparation, you need to do whatever you can to see profits this quarter. Drop that feature, fire this team, and you've just barely beat last quarter. Phew.

But now we have this quarter to worry about, and we've burned a bit of goodwill with our consumers by removing that feature, and we're short-staffed because we laid off all these people.

And the cycle repeats, trading in long term longevity for short-term profits.

Who would be stupid enough to buy at this point?

Do you know something we don't know? Are they secretly courting a private buyer instead of actually going for an IPO?