Agreed but sadly for something like Youtube it's basically impossible at this stage.
I've long replaced Mail, Maps, Calendar, Photos, Drive, etc with better alternatives from Apple and Microsoft.
Honestly it takes quite some cognitive dissonance to say that Apple's or Microsoft's products are better than Google's.
I've had multiple Microsoft accounts locked out. None of them were originally with Microsoft; they were with companies that were later bought out by Microsoft and then migrated to a Microsoft account. Goodbye Skype, Halo, Minecraft, etc. I won't ever use Office or an Xbox at this point.
And as far as Apple's concerned... well they talk the talk but their declining quality control demonstrates they don't really walk the walk. It doesn't take a genius to see where they're headed in another 10 years.
I decided I wanted to use Visual Studio enough that it was worth creating a Microsoft account for that purpose.
Then, I never did anything with the account other than use Visual Studio.
At some point, a message popped up in Visual Studio saying "the pattern of behavior for your account looks fraudulent, so we're disabling it". Visual Studio still worked fine.
I'm not sure what they were hoping would happen. They forced me to create an account I didn't want and had no use for, and then they shut it down for fraud when I didn't use it. OK?
But skype nags for microsoft account on every login.
If that's all it was, then I'd just create throwaway accounts all day long.
But the writing is on the wall. Microsoft wants to associate the software you write with a Microsoft account. It builds "trust" and "legitimacy" when they can "verify" that the software being deployed into the Microsoft store (or elsewhere) was created with a specific developer with an associated Microsoft account. Data mine your git repository and associate your commit metadata (eg; name, email, etc) with other products just as they do already on GitHub. Give you extra benefits (free hosting! remove advertisements! gain extra visibility to recruiters!) if you write software that's popular, and especially if it's only available on Windows; or penalize you (you don't "qualify" for free hosting; it costs $ to remove advertisements from your app; your app has fewer enablements; your LinkedIn profile is less-visible to recruiters; etc) if you write software for other platforms (Linux, macOS, iOS, etc)...
I guess said much simpler: you see the Embrace part by Microsoft's actions. I see the Extend and Extinguish part being enabled by those actions.
There is no difference in terms of privacy. If that's why you replaced them.
Transparency is a dependency of trust. Neither Google, Apple, nor Microsoft are transparent about the software they offer, the data that software collects, or how they use the data collected. They are in fact quite opaque about all of those things. The only assurance of privacy they offer is their word.
Apple does have the occasional third-party review of cryptography and whatnot.
Apple also have an actual, single phone support number in multiple languages and countries that you can use as a paying customer. Day and night with Google.
Being up in arms about the lack of privacy from Google is fair, and something I agree with. But Apple doesn't offer dramatically more privacy from Apple that I'm aware of. Both allow, but discourage, free accounts, and run ad networks (that they don't sell user information on)
I'm not even arguing there's no difference, just that there's less than everyone likes to pretend
Usually when you ask this, people just tell you again why they're right. That means they aren't really open to changing their mind. If I can prove you're wrong, will you change your mind?
"Neither Google, Apple, nor Microsoft are transparent about the software they offer, the data that software collects, or how they use the data collected."
Apple is very different than the other two here. Do you actually believe otherwise or are your goalposts just... set as to be useless?
That's a major component of what transparency entails, and that's what's a dependency of trust. No source code = no transparency, no transparency = no trust. Simple.