Profiting on What's Right

On the same day I wrote my post about Netflix and a the beauty of a companies business goals being aligned with customer desires, Adrian covered the same topic over at the Zeus Jones blog with more depth. He tells the story of a cheap cancer treatment that pharma isn't interested in, as well as credit card companies profiting off late fees (he had also covered late fees and the Netflix model earlier) and the electronics industry profiting off the lack of sustainability in its products. Adrian sums up the issue nicely with this: "I think of this as a very fundamental contradiction in the system. A system structure that rewards companies for doing the wrong thing. A system that, in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, simultaneously forces companies to look for the most expensive way to solve a problem and that prevents them from solving the most pressing problems."