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Incorrect, a business exists solely to make money, that is the purpose of it's existance. People who truly have some other goal they hold above profit, make organizations and societies instead. Further, any public company is even worse as the recent trends tend towards firing ceos that don't consistantly keep the profit margins rising, thus many such companies keep rotating through ceos, engendering an atmosphere of raising the profits at all costs cause they get fired otherwise.
The very structure if the core of the business model rewards evil behaviour and punishes moral behaviour, worse is that business is warfare, just without guns and bombs. Look at how employees are handled, they are paid wages, an expense. A prospective employee has to convince the company they are worth hiring, a skill called salesmanship, a skill usually unrelated to the skills required to do the job, and it us a toughy, because you either get a job (for which selling yourself is essential), starve to death, or accept being a horrible person living on the charity of others or by stealing from them (both categories of undesirable behaviour).
Once an employee gas a job, they must orotect their job, this means actively hindering any development of technology or processes that would eliminate the need of the employee. It also creates an atmosphere of competition, especially when rumors of cutting job positions start circulating, every employee benefits from making other employees seem more expendible.
Beyond employees, there is the goal of profits itself, for which there will never be a situation in which the most profitable solution will also be the most morally correct one, much less resulting in a better product.
Pharmacutical companies for example, literally can not afford to make their customers healthy, cause if they did, they would go out of business, as either the medicine would be too expensive to be purchased, or they wouldn't make enough to cover development costs.
Another example is cars. We get stuck with pieces of junk literally designed to fall apart after five years to force repeat customers, because they would make far less money building cars that could last decades. Selling only to first time buyers or those who have had cars stolen or smashed is not a sustainable strategy for making profits. (it is however, a good strategy for minimizing costs for a group over the long term).
I, on the other hand, exist for reasons that I may choose for myself. My only concern for money is that I work seven days a week and can't even afford to eat three meals a day. I only have internet because it comes bundled with the cheapest phone plan I can find, and I only have a phone because it is a requirement of my job.
My survival depends on it, as does the survival of my family. I truly believe this to be wrong. I believe that any individual who works even just full time at a job needed by the community should have the essentials of living comfortably provided, without need to sell themselves to an entity that sees the individual as an expense to be minimized.
Give me that, and I truly would rather spend the extra time gathering additional resources to make something right, than to make something cheap.
But even that is going off track. The cost comment that started this was about how cost affects design.
In designing a product that you desire to sell for profit will be designed as less capable because it is cheaper, but a product designed to be the best product of it's type without regard to profitability, will have vastly different design philosophy, in particular, any costs savings will come from designing the process that creates the product to be more efficient rather than changing the product itself.
Thus, if one is thinking in terms of what is possible rather than what makes a good profit, cost is not a concern to the design.
