Mustn't upset the precious shareholders.
Well, the fact is Altium is a publicly listed company, and they do have a legal fiduciary responsibility as a public company to make a profit for their shareholders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary
Many people forget this.
If they were a charity, they would be registered as a charity, not a public company.
Well, to be absolutely precise, fiduciary responsibility requires that they
try to make money for the investors, not that that they succeed. And most investors in companies understand that management has pretty wide latitude to pursue that according to how they think is best, at least until the board punts them all. It's true that sometimes shareholders sue their management, but it's not super common, and I think success is even less common. The whole world of corporate governance, management v. investor is very interesting, but in my opinion, these days it is management that has the upper hand.
That said, it is theoretically possible that a company could radically change their business in order to make more money. They might give away one product to make demand for another product. That's a bet that management could take, and the cost could be dear in the short term and but maybe work out in the long, maybe not. I can't think of successful examples of this pivot, but I'm sure there are some.
I don't know much about Altium's business, but they would not be the first company with a best-in-class product with high-end pricing realizing that they are getting more dollars from a smaller and smaller segment of the market. Management could be thinking long-term for a way out of that trap, but investors won't "get it." In such cases, it is the investors who can't see past the end of the quarter, who might be getting in the way of their own profit. Or it could be that management is wrong and their idea is bad. (Also, investors own interests are not homogeneous. Some are day traders, in and out of Altium between 9am and 5pm. Others have been holding the stock for years. They want management to do different things, for sure.)
Anyway, outcomes are only known post-hoc, but a court is not going to judge management on their post-hoc record, only on the quality of their thinking based on the available information at the time the decisions were made.