Not sure how New Zealand does things, but in the EU, it's relatively common to have zombie companies stagger on for decades on government life support.
There's a _ton_ of funding going from the states to various agencies for various pro-software, next-silicon-valley initiatives. Most of this money is handled by career bureaucrats with little personal experience in running a business.
It's easy to waste someone else's money by giving CPR to a large domestic IT firm, when the alternative is being held responsible for the lost jobs when the company goes under.
I wonder if this is in fact even worse, keeping people "occupied" in money-losing companies, where if the company went under they might (especially in tech) find something productive (in the literal sense of producing something of value) to do.
That seems more likely especially in a case like this, where the employees are skilled, and where the company isn't doing anything unique (novel, charitable, beneficial to society in a nonprofit way, etc) that would merit rating it by some other metric than profit.
It just seems tremendously wasteful to be losing tons of money in a market where there's already a lot of competition and you're not doing anything new. This isn't an electric car, and AI, a space company, where the outlay might be a lot and the time to develop the tech is great, this is a long-established market full of already-solved-profitably problems.
I would guess most of Xero's employees are outside of NZ, but since NZ's primary export is dairy, the government might be foolish enough to try propping it up with some nebulous hope that "keeping the tech industry afloat" will somehow be beneficial, rather than letting the few technologists in their employ go to work for another, more useful company, or to go and start a startup of their own (perhaps with government funding, in lieu of it going to Xero, in that hypothetical situation.)
I use Xero and the interface and functionality is great, but what makes you think someone writing JavaScript for Xero has the skill to work on AI or spacecraft?
I worked on js and php once, and now I work on AI. The tech market in NZ is very limited so I imagine anyone working for Xero in NZ has better-than-average odds of being there just because its a job, rather than because thats all they know how to do (or all they want to know how to do).
Maybe without Xero, they'd be out looking for and learning new things, starting new companies, etc. That's what I would do if I worked for Xero (which was conceivable, at one point) and they closed down.
There's a _ton_ of funding going from the states to various agencies for various pro-software, next-silicon-valley initiatives. Most of this money is handled by career bureaucrats with little personal experience in running a business.
It's easy to waste someone else's money by giving CPR to a large domestic IT firm, when the alternative is being held responsible for the lost jobs when the company goes under.