It’s so much easier for me to de-M$/Meta than de-Google however. Namely because YouTube still offers some value to me that unfortunately Odysee lacks for the time being. Using Invidious helps a lot though.

So bad in what way? Windows 8 was when they started following the Google surveillance and "QA in customer prod" playbooks, which are the reasons I stopped keeping a backup copy of MS operating systems around.

> YouTube and Google are saints compared to Meta and Microsoft

They most certainly are not...

If anything, Google is trying it's damned hardest to pull off a "Microsoft v2" party.

Everything from intentionally harming competitors, defrauding their ad customers, ruthless tracking and selling information about their users, hoovering up the competition and then killing it (or at best, letting it rot in some corner). And oh - by the way! Google also happens to own the dominant web browser and is merrily InternetExplorerifying it more and more every day.

Frankly - the resemblance is so strong to mid 2000s MS that I'm staggered.

I think it was a long time ago now, back when Google stopped improving their core service (search) to help profits through a better service than the rest and no longer "breaking markets" like introducing Gmail with seemingly infinite storage at the time... (another service that has stalled) And now instead rather going for squeezing out profits by keeping people on their sites and selling their data.

But maybe it was just a realization of what was more profitable? R&D becomes exponentially more expensive the more advanced search you try to provide, but any random weird company will be interested in user data for marketing.

I mean Microsoft is now building the AI that will take livelihood of hundreds of millions of people and according to some might be the first step towards AI wiping out humanity. So the jury is still out.