Which Tech Giant Would You Drop?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Apple I could drop pretty easily too. An iPhone is nice, but it's not exactly the be all and end all. Any old Android phone could work well too.
Amazon... personally I'd be able to drop it easily, though most people would have more trouble there. That's because nowadays the products I mostly buy from there are computer accessories and games, and the latter is under serious competition from the likes of Steam, various digital download stores on consoles and even the companies themselves selling boxed versions.
Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance.
Microsoft would be tough, simply because Microsoft Office is really important to me, and I'm really used to Windows at this point.
Google is arguably the toughest one to drop. Why? Mix of services needed (it's damn hard to promote a website about certain subjects without YouTube nowadays, and Gmail is very convenient) and the fact their alternatives are just nowhere near as good for a search engine. Which is depressing given how far downhill Google's own search results have gone recently...
But yeah, interesting to see the stats there.
I sometimes buy groceries on those sites, but not all of it; only the things I don't need immediately but will soon (and if it doesn't have weirdly high pricing on it). I also usually use Prime Now and not Amazon.com.
As a foreigner, Amazon ( and others ) offers food that is simply not accessible in the local supermarket.
All the food that requires a trip to a larger supermarket or a specific shop ?
For example, my last buy was some sort of pasta that is difficult to find in London. I'm 100% certain I could find it in some Italian shop. I'm 80% certain at least 1 of the major supermarket stock at their largest store. To find out, I would need to explore the city. I don't want that pasta enough to dedicate a whole week-end to search for it. Alternatively, I can use internet and the first results are generally a shop that offers delivery. Again I don't want to dedicate a significant part of my we to go to that shop to buy 4 GBP worth of pasta.
(My ranking: I'd drop Apple and MSFT easily since I don't use anything by either company. FB would be easy to drop but I do use it and would miss it a little. Amazon and Google would be significantly more work to let go of.)
Edit: Found some data. https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple... Suggests 30% of Americans have an iPhone. Not sure what iTunes usage is like.
A New York Times poll that possibly has only been posted here is always going to skew more towards Apple users who are typically more affluent and higher educated.
Also it's 10% of people who viewed this page. It's not representative or particularly meaningful to make broader conclusions from.
Never even owned an iPod or used iTunes.
I don't actually think anything in my life would directly change. I don't run windows, use azure, own an Xbox, etc... but do use a computer heavily, deploy to cloud infrastructure often, and own a modern game console.
I think mostly service providers would be affected.
Apple is the least of my concerns when it comes to these companies honestly.
I don't use facebook at all. I can count the things I've ordered on amazon (in all 30+ years of my life) on one hand. I don't use microsoft or apple products unless I'm forced to because of some work related project. And this isn't even out of any crazy principles or anything. I simply like linux distros better than apple/msft. I use an android phone but mainly just the phone functionality personally (i.e. like a good ol nokia + gmaps).
Funny, I would of thought it would have effected me personally a lot more, especially me being a software developer and all. But honestly it would make my life a lot easier, then cross-platform would be just linux :)
2: Amazon, there's plenty of other options and - at least in Europe - I don't see any specific advantage to Amazon anyway.
3: Apple, overpriced lifestyle is not my style and I don't particularly like their attitude in many ways, nor do I like the idea of them having enough cash to buy a small country. It is not so much that I begrudge them their success but that I wonder what that power will eventually be used for.
4: Microsoft, using Linux since 1992, OS/2 before that, another company I won't miss having around. Having said that, as long as Apple is around I'd like to keep Microsoft alive as well, just like I wanted Apple to be there to make sure Microsoft did not gain a 100% stranglehold on mainstream personal computing.
5: Alphabet - or should I just say Google. I use some of their products in 'customised' form, Android without Google-proprietary stuff, the search engine without persistent cookies. I don't have a Google account though so I'm not tied to them by more than a search setting in a browser (Seamonkey, Firefox, Chromium, ...). There are other search engines, there are other mobile operating systems.
Microsoft is everywhere.
Never again.
Actually whilst I'm having a bitch about the abysmal user experience on Amazon, here's another: Don't let me fill my cart with things I can't buy (after I already selected my shipping address before even started to add items), and then tell me hey this item can't be shipped to your location, which I then remove, only to be told hey this item also can't be shipped to your location. Repeat for all the items. Just tell me all the god damn items that can't be shipped at once, or shit how about this for a trip... maybe don't let me add them in the first place. /rant
Amazon is a particularly good ecommerce site, but by no means alone in its class, and there are plenty of IaaS providers. (Getting locked in to AWS specific products is a bad idea anyway).
Microsoft products already have superior competitors on the marketplace. Retooling and retraining the entire business IT world will cost something, but it needs to happen anyway.
People have been trying to replace Facebook since it started; some new entrant will supplant it overnight.
No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I think it would take a long time for someone to replace its offerings with equivalently polished products, if it ever even happens (the demand for cheap stuff might be so strong that Apple is only viable because of brand inertia). I'd miss it.
Alphabet is unmatched in search, drive, email, and Bell Labs-style R&D moonshots. I doubt it's repeatable outside of the specific time and place from which it emerged.
I would dare say that Microsoft is encroaching on this slowly but surely. Between the Surface, Surface book, the upcoming niche desktop PC, and air-esque laptop, they are steadily coming up with compelling offerings that are eating into Apple's space.
Google's Pixel devices are also squeezing Apple, though mostly in the mobile market.
I don't use any Apple stuff, except vary rarely iTunes for music purchases, because I've still got credit there from ~5yrs ago.
Amazon have little to no presence in Australia currently, but that could change.
I'd love to get away from Facebook, but as previously discussed[1], my nooby friends are the main thing holding me back.
Microsoft seem to have mostly picked up their game in recent years, so I have no problem with sticking with them. That said, I refused to fully integrate like I have with Google (mail, calendar, etc.), because their products just don't seem to work as well.
It's actually very easy, and once you do you'll realise Google's significance in your life is seriously overestimated.
4. Alphabet. Alphabet/Google products are the next layer I use on top of MS products, therefore are the next hardest to remove.
3. Facebook. The next layer again; MS and Alphabet provide general case tools, FB is a particular implementation on top of those, so it would go before either of the above two.
2. Amazon. No Amazon in Australia anyway, no big loss.
1. Apple. Only Apple product/service I use is a keyboard. Happy to see it go.
I sometimes use Facebook to talk to non-close friends, although I do use Whatsapp daily, so I guess that counts too.
All in all, I don't think it's impossible to escape at least one of them.
You guess Android counts, well of course it does.
My contacts and calendar are synchronized with a webdav server called radicale that I self-host. I also self-host my own mail with a postfix+dovecot setup.
Really, the last remaining google service I use is google search. And I've hit a brick wall there. The alternatives just suck too much. DDG's search result has been consistently terrible, and while I still hope qwant will one day turn into a great product, right now the search result are still significantly poorer than google's.
Android doesn't count with a setup similar to mine, because it's all open source and doesn't communicate with google outside of expectations :).
Except apparently, Google, Facebook and Microsoft [1]. If you have any apps installed then probably AWS also indirectly or maybe even fulfillment that you don't know is coming from one of their FCs
That's not even mentioning that you're tracked across the world by them even if you don't go there directly.
I think the only person that doesn't use any of those and is still on the internet directly is RMS [2]
The idea that you can actually live in modern society and not touch one of the big 5 is misguided.
[1]https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck...
- Killing MSFT would do a lot of short-term economic damage, but the new innovation that happens to fill its place would probably be an easy net boon. Linux would be a fast replacement, and it would probably force that ecosystem to blossom. As someone who doesn't use any MSFT products (I have no need for them), I wouldn't personally suffer at all.
- Amazon is the center of online commerce, but I think it's already a fat, complacent company. Their infrastructure is famously good, but the purchasing experience is crap. Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online experience, and the recommendations are laughably bad. What takes its place would necessarily be much better.
- Apple's products are still a force of pressure on the market to innovate, though I suspect that will not be true for much longer. Their latest products are less clearly better than the competition, and they've made some bizarre design blunders. My next phone/laptop will likely not be Apple, so once their innovation dries up, seeing them disappear probably wouldn't make much of a difference in my life.
- Google and Gmail are still unparalleled. One could imagine something better than Gmail, but Google search is so core and effortless it's hard to picture what an improvement would look like. Deleting google would break the internet.
I can't believe that after all these years and all the engineers they must have, sorting a category by top rated still puts an item with one review and 5 stars above a product with 10,000 reviews and an average of 4.9 stars.
Yes, of course. All of them. I was alive before those companies existed, and life was more pleasant then in many ways. I already use Linux.
Google Search is a difficult one to replace in this line of work.
Google Maps is especially useful for people who tend to get lost, but I think it's also bad for people's brains, because it takes cognitive load off of the brain's navigation system, which is required for many cognitive tasks, including memory.* In any case, there would be other mapping companies to fill the space.
* It still needs more research, but this is interesting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm
What else?
Ultimately, I'd drop Facebook first largely because I see Apple as still providing some value-add, whereas it's hard to see any value-add from Facebook. I ultimately dropped Microsoft last because they're the only ones who have made decent office productivity software (I say this having used both Corel's stuff long ago and LibreOffice for several years).
For all of the visualization stuff that the NYT does, I'm surprised that the visualization here is pretty sucky. Only bar graphs of the top and bottom choices? Really? That's the most you could come up with?
Second drop would definitely be Facebook. I feel like my Facebook feed is largely full of shitty memes. It'd be annoying to lose Messenger, but most of the contacts I regularly speak with are available through other means of communication. If I were closing my account I'd probably message a bunch of people to make sure I have their alternative contact info. I don't think I'd be able to easily drop React and Flow. Migrating away from their ecosystem would be incredibly challenging for me.
I can't drop Amazon, Apple, or Google.
However, I don't have any realistic replacement business model to offer.
Makes me want to give up using computers.
I use G Suite both privately and at work, basically run my life via Calendar/Maps/Keep, and get a nervous twitch in my left eye just at the thought of what a massive hassle it would be to first switch, and very likely second -- maintain the alternative.
That's even before I consider that there would be no Google to turn to when configuring that alternative, that my phone would essentially become a Nokia E52 with a larger screen (no Google Apps, no Uber without Google Maps, not even the local bus/directions app would work, not sure about Signal), and I that would need to dig up a ton of data from a cold, cold storage.
On a lighter note, NYT is now writing HN-tailored clickbait. We captured the zeitgeist.
Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to.
Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work.
Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.
1. FB (because it doesn't serve any really important meaningful purpose... I much prefer reddit),
2. Apple: Because I hate apple products and their closed walled gardens when it comes to building apps and things (I'm android/linux desktop user).
3. MS: DOn't much use any of their products anymore, but did for a long time, and if I were to leave linux I'd probably go back to windows, since I like custom built computers.
4. Amazon: Love amazon, great deals - only place I shop, but if they didn't exist I'd probably find somewhere else using google.
5. Alphabet: Self-driving cars, android, youtube, gmail, search (I've tried bing, etc... but no other search provider gives the quality of results -- esp for coding questions), and they're even my isp: Google FIBER... so yeah this one would be a hard one to sever for me.
edit: I don't have an Apple product myself. Though the build quality is nice, it's expensive (and I am poor) also never used/could be confusing to use iOS/Mac OS.
Use Gmail... but you can use hotmail (microsoft), Yahoo (yikes). Chrome browser (google) ... Youtube (google) ahh you can use Vimeo... Don't use Facebook (don't have friends) though their marketing/advertising for a business is great.
Just my useless opinion
What do you use for IMing, group chats, organising events and sharing jokes (memes?) between friends? I'd imagine those are the main use cases of FB for most people. Nobody I know cares in the slightest about the news feed, it's just private groups and messenger.
I guess Google, since they're indirectly the most responsible for clickbait headlines.
He then goes on to rant about how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is and how difficult my life must be not using Google services.
The contrary is true. It's very easy not to use Google services and they are very replaceable.
> It's very easy not to use Google services
Both can be true. Which is more true for you depends on how much of the ecosystem you (and your peers) use. For example, the previous startup I worked for used Google services quite extensively. Chat, hangouts, documents, spreadsheets, drive, email, calendar, even YouTube... the cost of moving off would have been quite significant, for very little benefit.
The company before that didn't use Google at all, and instead used IRC, NFS/SMB servers, and private MX servers. They functioned fine, though many of the non-tech users were beginning to grumbling about the benefits of moving to Google (because that was what they were familiar with).
There's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy which always comes up when talking about moving off Google, but that doesn't mean the cost of replacing everything Google provides is anywhere near zero - especially when it comes to convenience.
In a way, Google's offerings have become the new Microsoft Office suite - used not because they're the best at any one thing, but because of all the value provided by everything together, and the familiarity of incoming users with that suite.
Google was surprisingly easy to drop. I use DuckDuckGo and quit GMail.
Microsoft I dropped more than a decade ago.
I never used Facebook.
I half-dropped Apple by switching away from Mac OS X, but I still own in iPhone that I'll drop when it breaks.
Facebook: Never had Facebook
Apple: Don't use any Apple products
Alphabet (Google): 90%+ searches are now through DuckDuckGo for me
Amazon: Needed as online shopping often through Amazon, and I still buy a lot of books through them
Microsoft: Must have, my life is intimately tied to Excel
I enjoy Apple and Google. products and don't see a need to drop.
Microsoft doesn't have a big impact on my personal life anymore. It wouldn't be feasible to remove them fro, my personal life, however.
So nowadays I'm coding Linux production software on a Mac with a Microsoft editor ;)
Microsoft's release cadence is also fantastic. They are constantly releasing updates all of which contain features/bug fixes that are voted on by users. You can't ask for anything more than that.
Windows is definitely getting better.