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To be honest out of the big tech companies which one is not there to "screw users" as you put it? Especially the ones that depend on ad revenue.

- Facebook: Their users are their product. There's enough evidence to show how they "use" their users daily in news articles, leaks, etc. Recently if I recall there was a leak about them knowing the harm on children their products cause but internal culture stopping them from doing anything on that front.

- Google: The amount of data they use to target users. Users again are the product. They drop platforms/technologies like the drop of a hat.

- Apple: Heard some stories about culture there as well that aren't crash hot. Is Swift/Objective C even OSS? Very proprietory but their brand seems to give them the cool factor? Not sure.

- Amazon: How they treat their non-tech employees, etc.

- etc etc etc.

They are all companies and in the end of the day profit matters once they get to a certain size. They all have their good and bad sides. Microsoft seems to have an "uncool" image here IMO probably originating from their dominance in a previous tech age but I can't see the difference now with other big tech companies that hold this level of market power. In some ways they are better - they don't need my whole life story and invade my privacy to make money if you care about that sort of thing. They also have pushed some good technology as well - the new .NET Core platform is impressive and in my testing good performance, decent languages originating some good ideas (as do other langs), still OSS with less confusion than for example all those JDK's on offer. There's good and bad parts in all companies, and tech stacks.

Can it be better? Yes. But that applies to most tech stacks, cultures and companies as well.

I disagree with some of that.

Amazon pays very well. I hear good things from workers through the grapevine, it’s just that doesn’t make a good tech story. They let me live car free and they make a whole world of options available to consumers who otherwise might not have access. They pay quite well, enough to make #FightFor15 look antiquated. They are relentless in serving customers and in 10+ years as a customer they have gotten better at serving me every year, if not every month. People complain about monopolization, but they are still smaller than Walmart. They achieve dominance in online retail by offering better service, period. There’s no reason small business can’t do a better job serving their communities, but they often just choose to not be competitive in offering the best possible service, which I find offensive. Even when I was pushing carts and bagging groceries, or cooking paninis for college students, I always went out of my way to provide great service and not keep people waiting. I guess you could say I’m customer obsessed.

Apple makes the fastest, most reliable computing devices in my life. They produce devices with staying power, so I can resell them or give them to family when I want to upgrade, which is great for reducing waste. They single-handedly invented the category of true wireless headphones, and brought ANC to them; living and walking near a freeway, this improves my life substantially literally every day. The CSAM scanning was annoying, but otherwise they’ve been good to me. They’re also advancing the state of the art with their CPUs and making the industry competitive again, which is good for everyone, including hopefully someday android users. They make some bad choices, but at maybe 1/10 the rate that Microsoft does for similar products.

Google is somewhat neutral. I’d like the option to buy my way out of ads, but otherwise I think the service offered by their Search and Maps offerings make up for some other issues. They seem to be held back by their bad management structure, more than being specifically directed to be shitty to customers. The nonsense with Windows Phone and blocking PiP YouTube on iOS are exceptions. Overall I still find them less offensive than most, but I’m not exactly enamored. If they got rid of that awful Google Fi ad, they could maybe be considered benevolent overall.

Facebook is in a league of its own. Truly awful and explicitly acting maliciously at a corporate level, which is inexcusable. Almost Exxon suppressing climate change research level of malice towards humanity. Complicit in genocide level bad.

I might just be particularly bitter about Microsoft as an ex-fanboy of Windows. A product they have somehow managed to make worse than Linux desktop on some new devices. Seeing a team invest actual engineering hours into turning the platform that debuted the Trusted Computing Initiative into a privacy-hostile, ad-pushing tool to push Edge adoption is just really infuriating. And unnecessary.

Agreement or disagreement - my point is each company does both good and bad. What people choose to see is somewhat colored by your previous position/bias just like everyone else. Will be the devil's advocate here.

Microsoft advanced personal computing for the majority especially outside the US where Apple pretty much was non-existent for a long time. I would argue through its life Microsoft has advanced personal computing more than most of the other tech firms. Growing up every office, every PC, every time I tried to code mostly it was on an IBM-compatible machine. Apple for a very long time wasn't very competitive IMO from a product perspective, and I think recent developments are overhyped compared to some of the big innovations of the 80's, 90's (i.e. Windows 95 was big, moving from Windows XP to Mac OS is a lot less so IMO). In fact on an Apple machine most people are just doing what they did previously on their Windows machines - just needing more power to do so (surfing the internet, office productivity, etc).

I'm glad that Apple are trying another CPU, just like I'm glad AMD do and Intel did in the long distant past. Competitiveness, not culture is what drives companies to do this. But w.r.t development/coding they aren't the leader, and their walled garden doesn't personally make their dev tech stack endearing. I don't agree they are the fastest all the time (even with the M1), and I personally don't like MacOS despite being forced to use it for work daily for many years. I see the M1 somewhat as a TSMC victory and their 5nm process + Apple wanting total control to differentiate/move away from a competitive PC market to a monopoly like one. At least Microsoft wanted/encouraged PC competition and didn't charge that much for Windows on top even back in the 90's/2000's.

For a long time you could get PC's that were faster for cheaper than Mac's. While Apple's approach to vertical integration has an advantage short term w.r.t efficiency its definitely allows an "embrace and extinguish" strategy - long term having hardware as interoperable commodity (CPU, GPU, etc) is better for competitive priced computing IMO. As a buyer more suppliers means a more competitive market - vertical integration is something most companies would love to pull off as it product differentiates and creates economic margins. Apple is the worst on this aspect. They aren't an open platform and the only thing capping their price and forcing them to improve is because they are still the underdog market share wise and they want to beat the PC market. Not a fan of the Apple ecosystem lock in but that's just me, its worse than Android/Google.

Obviously they all have bad points but that's my point. All these companies have their good and bad sides. I just feel the hate Microsoft gets a lot more hate vs other tech companies. Especially given recent changes, is a bit over the top.

> It turns out apparently all of Microsoft is driven by leadership that wants to make the world a worse place for human beings.

The real problem with our modern capitalist utopia is that ALL companies, once they reach a certain size and percentage of the market, take the Microsoft's-of-the-2000's approach, buy up or squash anything that looks even close to competing, grease the wheels with the regulators, plant stories in the media, and implement changes to the products that curtail why people were excited about them to begin with.

> ...unlike some other companies...

Which ones?

Specifically Facebook comes to mind. They claim they need to use algorithms for maximum engagement, which is probably true.

I still think they would be fine if they just made the news feed chronological (I remember when it more or less worked that way) and let users make their own choices about what to see. I use Twitter that way, where at least they give the option. Next door also has that option, but they automatically turn it off after (iirc) 60 days.

Of course if they weren’t just promoting things that made people upset, engagement would drop and they would be less fantastically profitable. But their users would be healthier and probably happier. I think it is valid for companies to choose to make $5 billion in profit a year over $10 billion, if that’s the cost of respecting human dignity and promoting human thriving. I get that that’s a controversial opinion.