McDonald's and Walmart might be the strongest restaurants/stores, but that doesn't mean I want to shop there.
Or things like "Everyone I know is switching to Whole Foods from Walmart, this means Whole Foods will take over in a year's time and Walmart will die off".
I don’t shop there and a lot of HN probably doesn’t. A LOT of other people do.
If you don't want products and services from Microsoft, Walmart and McDonald's, all 3 companies who don't seem to advertise much- do you find yourself buying products from big advertisers?
I don't find these companies low quality, so I'm wondering what would make you avoid them.
In any case, nobody should have to patronize a company if they don't want to, whatever their motivation. The problem with the big tech companies is that one so frequently doesn't have a choice. I may not want to buy from MS, but some bit of hardware I'd like to use only supports Windows drivers and some bit of paperwork I need to fill out is distributed as a Word doc whose formatting doesn't render correctly outside of MS Office.
In all fairness, one can avoid Walmart and McDonalds if one wants to, but Google and Facebook are as hard to avoid as Microsoft.
It's worked out well enough. Eliminating Google sounds too painful to me, so I'm glad my family agreed to share their photos on Google's platform for me.
It just depends on my given needs for a given thing. As to Windows, I'd rather be on linux or mac, but there are a couple things I work on that are core to the business absolutely tethered to windows.