I've been watching this topic for a little while, and have decided to jump in with a few observations.

There is clearly a lack of detailed information regarding Companies, both the Grand Companies as well as the possibilities of private Companies later. My thought is that there are two possible reasons for this lack of information:

a) Square Enix has them "all figured out", but doesn't want to release the information. Given that SE has acknowledged that FFXIV isn't satisfactory, and given that Yoshi-P has been producer for only a few months, I doubt this is the case.

b) The details for the Company system have not been finalized. This would be more consistent with the [dev1034] Introduction of Public Companies being included in the "in development" section, as well as Yoshi-P's reluctance to divulge information that may yet change.

It is all too likely that some features have been designed by the developers, but not every single last detail. It is also quite likely that some of these features are still subject to change. Yoshi-P has released quite a few questionnaires, and to all appearances seems to take this feedback seriously. At the same time, he also has some internal vision guiding him as to where the game will and will not go.

A good portion of the threads within this topic are requests for more information, consistent with assumption "a". There have been a few side suggestions for a particular feature, or people assuming that Companies will be similar to another feature from FFXI or another MMO. I think that, in part, this is because there is so little information about Companies that it is difficult to provide suggestions or comments.

To the developers:
If there is anything more about Companies that you can tell us now, features that have been finalized, please can you give us some additional information so that we can make suggestions and provide feedback from within that framework?

To the players:
Recognize that the lack of information means that Companies are not finalized, and that the development team under Yoshi-P has done their best to incorporate ideas and suggestions from players into the game. We should be posting up ideas for what we would like to see Companies become, what their role in the game-world should be, and equally what they should not be. (Keep in mind that there will be a lot of contradictory ideas, but just having them up there gives the dev team more information from which to assemble something)

In the absence of any further feedback from the development team, I suggest that we make the following assumptions:
  • Grand Companies will be introduced first
    Grand Companies will be an NPC institution, with at least one such entity per city-state.
  • The in-game lore purpose of Grand Companies is to bring together and coordinate all the resources of Eorzea for the purposes of combating the threat of the Garlean Empire.
  • Private Companies will be introduced later. These will presumably be smaller, more specialized versions of Grand Companies, but will be player-run.

As far as I know this is all that we players really know about the Company system. I will keep this original post updated if/when anyone can provide more information about specific features of Companies, so please post replies of that nature to this thread.