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Comment by rustystump | Hacker News Reader

Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.

I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.

The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.

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The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...

MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.

In the profitable cases (and maybe just as open offer), why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?

There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.

Maybe the offer was made and a bunch didn't take it?

> why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?

Saving corporate face

> There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.

Any movie studio that rebooted a franchise after a decade or two of dormancy would beg to differ

Dunkey has a great overview of how Microsoft handles studios/IP: https://youtu.be/GWrcUh2GuPQ

For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.

It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.

I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.

Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.

Amen. Also, forcing us to tie our local OS into their cloud nonsense is a travesty. Hearing that they will soon disallow updates to those of us that don't capitulate to their cloud-account ransom has kick-started my efforts in formally moving away from Windows. I'd rather lose most games than get a cloud account.

You dont lose your steam games. They launch on Linux

Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence, but I can’t see what the point of the company is beyond that. Enterprise something something maybe. And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.

Lets not pretend like there wouldn't be dozen of quality and actually used software if it wasn't for microsoft existing.

I actively prefer Libre Office.

Yes, Excel is probably a lot better if you use English setup and advanced functions.

For me,

- not having to use Norwegian for formulas (my work machine has Norwegian setup and Excel insists on using Norwegian formulas)

and

- not having it trying to find something it can misinterpret as a date, preferably some random place in a list of thousands of items

makes it worth it.

Just change your windows display language to English?

Should I also change it on my mother's computer who doesn't speak English? We can also start distributing .bat files that change the system language along with our spreadsheets, for anyone who wants to open them. Maybe automate it with VBS, so it changes automatically when you open the spreadsheet. That's the solution.

The VBS should then also lock the spreadsheet to foreground while it's opened, because the global change may affect other apps, like Windows Calculator may swap the comma/thousand separator.

Will write a user story for that if you share the link /s

Work computer, so I might not be able to do it.

Also, why shouldn’t I be able to choose which language I use in Excel when they’re clearly all available?

Why do software companies these days insist on treating me as though I can’t look after myself?

Interesting. I consider Excel the worst of Microsoft's misdeeds. Not that there's not an abundance to pick from, but Excel may very well top the list.

It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.

It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.

It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.

I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.

Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.

But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.

I'd need a pretty strong argument to believe the world would be better absent spreadsheet programs.

My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.

Without a doubt, if Excel didn't exist, someone would have created it.

It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.

And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...

I'm told there were better spreadsheet software back in the day, but that Excel basically won accounting/finance by allowing itself to be shareware (i.e. effectively free), in a similar way to how Microsoft has at times turned a blind eye to piracy of its other produce (e.g. Windows).

Not really. Once Windows came in, Excel was pretty much the best game in town. Lotus didn't really do a great job on Windows. There were some attempts at more integrated office suites but they didn't really take off. There were also some attempts at different spreadsheet models but people were probably too used to essentially the original Visicalc model. Not sure that Excel was anymore effectively shareware than any of its competitors.

piracy in the school playground in the 90s did much to cement the use of MSFT Office at home

Not so much.. I mean if Word Perfect and Lotus 123 had a merger, then they would still be competitive as neither was really better than the MS Office counterparts, but as a combo they would have had more entrenchment to work from.

IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.

> Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs.

What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.

Now let's talk about MS Access!

Also a good point- but there is no python runtime on accounting and PMs computers. And it’s also a huge mess to try and support. Imagine some python code from 10 years ago, then juggling the versions, then god forbid any module dependencies. It’s simply not portable. Meanwhile the VBA written in 2000 is still working all contained in an excel Workbook.

If pleebs can understand it, surely it’s not as foul as you state.

Nonetheless i hear your argument. I feel that python is the same abomination of the programming world. Yet it flourishes and is even loved.

Haveth we stockholm syndrome to our own garbage tools?

I would dare to say that all business apps start as an Excel sheet (or Google Sheet) and after the usefulness of data collection and data arrangement/presentation is validated (often long after the usefulness is validated) they eventually become a full-fledged business web app.

What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.

Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.

It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.

> It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.

That's a bingo, although I'd phrase it even more glowingly as "It allows people to solve many common problems with computing, without knowing about pointers."

And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.

Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.

Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).

Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.

With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.

I hate the localized function names quite a lot too. In german it even uses umlauts in some of them.

CSV literally stands for Comma Separated Values, so I don't know what you expect. For the most part, you should have (double)quotes around your values that contain commas and double the double-quotes for literal instances.

UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.

Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.

> And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.

I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]

Cognitive Style of Powerpoint - Edward Tufte

http://makingdatatalk.com/Lecture01/Reading/Tufte-TheCogniti...

Microsoft are wielding the entire office suite as a weapon against free and interoperable formats…

It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.

If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.

Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.

Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.

I’ve never come across Google docs in the wild in a corporate setting.

Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.

Microsoft Office is probably still the largest player but a former large company I worked for absolutely used Google for 95% of purposes. I didn't even have a Microsoft Office license. It's very common. If we had to exchange docs with someone that didn't use Google, we'd export formats in some way including, often, to PDF.

It's all anecdotal, but I haven't seen Microsoft Office in my job since 2010. It's been wall-to-wall Google for the past four companies.

Gsuite (including docs) is the norm at most companies I’ve worked at that have been founded since 2010, though the finance depts usually also had their own excel licenses.

That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.

I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs. I don't know that most people need it. I will say that interactive mode in gdocs is slightly better. I also like Outlook slightly better, though I do wish they'd slim it down a bit, it feels bloated.

My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.

> I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs.

I reinstalled Wordpad. Wordpad is sufficient for most things (including opening and editing most simple word documents--though that may be because I created them myself with office 2007) and if I really need a word processor (styles, page layout, etc) then I also have LibreOffice. I didn't even consider an Office license when I rebuilt last.

Thoughtworks was on GSuite when I was there.

Anecdata, 10k+ Eng department, it’s all GSuite. Office365 exists as well for external interop but I’ve never seen anyone reach for it due to preference since it existed.

It basically comes down to whether your sales arm demands native Teams and subsequent MSFT stack. Anyone deploying major production in GCP/GKE tends to go full Technical Partner with GOOG, google docs included.

FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.

I find Docs and Slides are fine and really preferable because they do a good job with 95%+ of the functionality you probably want without word art and stuff like that. Sheets is more stripped down relative to Excel but absent pivot tables and the like, most people don't need that.

My experience for smaller companies is more like:

- if you have GMail, people(esp engineering) use docs and 1-n people have Excel on top

- if you are all in on MS, then of course no one will use GDocs

That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.

Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.

OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.

This is not an interface problem but deliberate action to make office formats non-compatible with other software.

Personally I prefer 90s software design over the bloated crap of today.

> Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence

Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)

I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.

Americans don't use CSV?

Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.

To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.

I don't know any of these problems. I use a modern operating system and office suite that supports CSV not a specific subset and syntax of it.

1.01 in US === 1,01 in EU

   1.01, "hi", CSV has problems, "1.01"
   1,01, "hi", Yes it really does, "1,01"

See the problem now?

Your operating system cannot solve this problem.

Not all of EU though. I am European and I never used "," anywhere yet people understood.

I don't understand the down-votes, but okay, have it your way, lmao. Someone really hates dots.

I guess the downvotes are because you also didn't understand the context.

It's not about people, it's about the Windows locale setting and how MS Excel interprets a CSV-file when you doubleclick it

Yeah, I agree with that and I find it frustrating.

CSV already solved this problem with quotes. Maybe not the most convenient solution for some users but that's no excuse for the Excel behavior of making up a different format depending on the locale.

Excel really doesn't care what users think. I mean, in biology, we've already had to change the names of genes to accommodate Excel's auto-date conversion routines. So, why would it care to have globally consistent CSV formats?

Is this 2025? Why would any software safe it invalid like that to begin with?

The syntax that MS Office uses to read/write a CSV is defined by the Regional Settings of your PC.

Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom control.exe intl.cpl

If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV

Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Obviously both . And , are used way to often not only for numbers. I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.

> Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain.

Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator.

If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV.

But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly.

> I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.

It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.

this seems like less of an excel problem and more of an issue with an improperly escaped data set though?

No. Excel changes the SEPERATOR when parsing depending on the locale settings. This means a CSV generated or saved with a decimal of . will not be able to be opened by one with a , and vice-versa. This is an Excel issue, as it doesn’t even try to determine or ask which separator to use. Hence why the comment above said you need to use the import wizard and not double click.

Excel's behaviour is almost as annoying. It's basically impossible to produce a correctly-formatted German document on an English OS and vice-versa.

For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they cannot let us choose the decimal separator independently from the locale. Or for fuck’s sake, just be smart about it. My desktop is for boring administrative tasks, of course I want it in my language. No, I don’t want to manually change settings in Word for every fucking document I create because ~none of them will be in English. But then why do I have to search-and-replace . with , or click 12 times through an inane bullshit wizard just to paste some data in Excel?

Respecting regional settings is so inconsistent among Office applications. The desktop ones usually get it, but online is a crapshoot. Whenever there's a date like 3/4/25 I get the play the fun guessing game of whether that's March or April.

For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.

Right but the import wizard can fix things. They just don't make the double-click go through the import wizard - and people use 'open' or double-click their files. LibreOffice Calc opens the import wizard when you open a csv and it's fine.

> Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard.

Ofc you do. In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.

yeah, what Excel does is, it assumes the comma and separator of your regional settings and doesn't care if it fails or not.

> In practice, a CSV file can decide to use `|` for comma, and `<>` instead of quotes.

Ofc it is. Now try to edit that CSV with Excel and save it again in that format.

CSV is data only. Excel handles way more than that. XLSX is the preferred file format because it's compressed XML that can hold all kinds of things.

Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.

Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.

OMG--we had a worfklow where less-techy folks were supposed to edit a csv, then check it in to github, which would kick off a whole process automatically for them. I kid you not--anyone who edited the csv in Excel would eff the whole file up every single time! They just needed a text editor, which we told them to use, and the changes were literally simple, either editing an existing entry or adding a new entry. Nope, these college educated "IT" workers could not handle it! We ended up having to scrap the entire automation workflow because the employees were simply too dumb to use a text editor and github.

Maybe I’m just not understanding the nuances of what you were working on, but is it possible that there was something wrong with the solution if literally every person was screwing it up?

Excel and Minesweeper. I'm still so angry about what they did to Minesweeper.

Who invented the spreadsheet?

The victors truly get to write history, don't they?

I just wish the Mac version wasn’t so painful

Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?

I have yet to see a single ad on either the menus on Ubuntu or in OSX. Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?

A few times over the years Ubuntu included Amazon ads in the OS. Each time, afaik, the community reacted angrily and it didn't last.

Once ever. The default search returned results from Amazon and local files potentially leaking your search intended to find local files to Ubuntu who in turn claimed that it was ok because potentially intensely personal info that could be inferred from queries weren't personally attributable to you.

This was obviously not ok and it never happened again this was if I recall correctly around 2012.

Ah thanks. I did a quick search before posting and this article was listed as from 2019, but that was when it was last updated - it did just happen once in 2012.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/mark-shuttleworth-explai...

There's also a couple places where Ubuntu advertises their commercial services in the OS, including in apt ("Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro...") and in the default login message (promotions for Ubuntu Landscape, as well as various other products and services through motd-news).

Apple barely does it and only for their products. I agree with you that that’s already too much and too annoying but that’s an order of magnitude less than Microsoft who advertise their products pretty aggressively AND ALSO are advertising for whoever gave them money too.

Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.

Apple barely does it and only for their products.

With the recent notable exception of the F1 movie advertisement that arrived as a notification from the Wallet app. https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/more_on_apples_trust-erod...

I disabled Wallet notifications immediately :-(

Obviously not defending it, but isn’t the F1 movie produced by Apple?

Yes. There's still an entire drama about how inappropriate it is for the Wallet app to advertise a movie.

Yes. And the debacle was so loud because it does not happen generally (I’d have to go back to the U2 album thing to find something comparable).

They nag too much about their services, though. I don’t fucking want Fitness whatever or News thing, I would like the OS to stop putting a red dot in my settings. But anyway that’s not as brain dead as what I’ve seen on Windows.

I agree.

Not getting stuff pitched to you constantly by everyone is such an unending exercise of updating preferences, "unsubscribing", rejecting permissions requests, etc. It feels almost futile.

Not to mention the "ask again later..." option having replaced the flat out "no" option.

Even the people you'd imagine might be more sensible (eg Proton) email the crap out of you by default.

So when even the OS starts doing it, it's somewhat infuriating.

Apple pushes their products often on iOS and many of them can't ve turned off or can't be turned off easily.

So you have notifications that you can only get rid of by engaging with the Apple ads.

Yes, the most egregious of which being the setting app.

Its an OS setting app. Its the most fundamental bundled application in an operating system, second only to maybe the file manager or package manager. Is nothing sacred?

lol I was actually thinking of the setting app in my comment. I agree, it bugs me every time I pick up my phone.

It's gotten to the point where I resist looking at my iPhone because I'm going to have to take up my brain space with the unwanted notifications. I'm not sure what it is but on Android it's less pushy and I can clear all notifications with a single click. So most of the time my new iPhone sits in a drawer and I use my old Android as I go about my day.

Hmm, what notifications do you get from the Settings app? I don't recall ever getting any. And you can clear all notifications with a single tap on iOS.

When you open the app, the top half of the screen is dedicated to selling you their subscriptions. If you're already subscribed, you won't see it. It looks like a settings app. If you're not subscribed, you enter an ad hell and you can't make those notifications disappear until you at least view the ads.

Ah, I have the 200GB iCloud subscription, no wonder then.

You can also not show notifications from specific apps, which I find much better.

I definitely appreciate the android interaction for notifications, in that I can long-press a notification and jump straight into settings to disable if I like.

I have most notifications disabled at this point.

>Apple barely does it and only for their products

And U2

11 years later I still refuse to listen to their music

That's okay, they'll be fine With or Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XayyES2vO8Q <3

News app is part of the OS image and littered with ads. I just got an ad in Settings for the month to month Applecare because mine is expiring. Took a few tries of declining to get the badge on Settings to go away.

Unlike with Apple, you have virtually unlimited choices of Linux distributions that are ad-free.

> Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?

I looks like Ubuntu was created just in order to be able to dismiss Linux as "also advertise products". It's just a single distribution out of a hundred, and far from the best, so it's completely wrong of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300531.

Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand.

My ranking from most evil to least would be:

1. Google

2. Meta

3. Microsoft

4. Amazon

5. Apple

6. Netflix

Don't forget their military and surveillance contributions

Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)

Enabling Cambridge Analytica[0] alone ranks Meta far worse than Amazon. Amazon has done nothing remotely close to necessitating abandoning their own brand AFAIK.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Project Nimbus is Amazon and Google together. Meta was early on the genocidal train, in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as adjacent to the 'regime change' obsession of usian elites.

Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.

Can we get an honorable mention for Adobe? I'd put Adobe probably right under Apple.

Adobe would be far more evil if they weren't so bad at making software. I think their intentions and business practices are clearly equal to or more evil than Apple, they just don't have nearly the scale and market reach that Apple has.

I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something.

I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?

Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too.

They single-handedly dismantled a thriving browser ecosystem. They pushed Real Name policies, used Google+ to stifle innovation, and then finished the job by shutting Google+ down.

And so on.

You are making exactly the mistake I am pointing out in my comment. Outside of the HN bubble nobody cares at all about a "thriving browser ecosystem." They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that. And this is where Google's dominance has a tangible benefit. The amount of resources that Google can apply to Chrome development is massive compared to what could be done in the highly competitive market that existed before it.

You can argue that maybe a highly competitive browser market would lead to more innovation, but I'm not sure that's the case. Could a highly fragmented market build something that is as good as Chrome? IDK, but my (moderate confidence) bet is no. Browsers are a pretty mature product at this point and I don't think that competition would produce enough competitive pressure to outweigh the massive resources of a dominant near monopoly.

> They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that.

And now Google is slowly but surely moving to shut down ad blocking.

Some of us just saw it coming a mile away.

They merged with DoubleClick¹, an advertising company. The combined company was about twice the size of the old google so it severely diluted their ranks with a huge cohort of the worst kinds of MBAs: Advertising & Marketing executives.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick

> Google seemed so great in the beginning.

It's almost like they were good at marketing.

Can we add Palantir at the top?

What's so evil about Netflix?

They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)

DRM is probably something that people take issue with, and it's probably harder to buy physical media that you "own" more than streaming services.

Cancelling popular shows in the second season because it makes marginally more money to do that

Does google collect more information than Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Palantir etc?

I don't think so. Collecting data is a baseline for all those companies, you have to rank the evil they do with that data.

Yes. Yes they do. Collecting data is most of the point of Google apps/services/devices.

Google then aggregate all that data in the cloud, whereas even if Apple do collect data it’s almost never sent to the cloud for cross-analysis, it’s almost always on-device and therefore private.

> Does google collect more information than Apple

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

lol. Amerika Freedom ™

> they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more

Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.

why do you think meta is more evil than google?

ah yes Google, the less evil company that manipulates search results to facilitate their desired election outcomes, lmao

> They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.

As did Ubuntu.

>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.

Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?

They aren’t even close…

Windows normalized having ads in the OS.

Ads in the OS? That isn’t Microsoft’s idea, or even Apple’s (they have places they do it too). No, that was popularized by the mobile OS made by an ad company, Android.

Weirdly that I don't get any ads in Android.... My phone was made by the same ad company.

No? Try installing 1 app without seeing ads for 10 other useless apps.

Haven't installed an app in ages, but seeing an ad in a store isn't as bad as seeing an ad in my app launcher. And yes, windows puts ads in the start menu.

The store is part of the OS… if you say "no ads" and just exclude ads… that's kinda on you.

I mean yes, technically, but really no that's clearly not what was being objected to. Finding adds in arbitrary interfaces seems dystopian to me. Whereas having a discreet "suggested" or "promoted" tab or bracket for software in the app store - the place I go to get software - doesn't bother me. There are certainly ways they could screw it up but they don't seem to have done so yet.

Also as it happens I don't even see those because I exclusively use FDroid at this point. So ironically I see no ads when using a device designed and sold by an advertising company and haven't for years.

I install apps all the time without seeing an ad, because 90% of the apps I use are installed from F-Droid.

The apps I install from F-Droid often help me block ads in my browser, so I see very few ads as I use my phone day to day.

Meanwhile, my understanding is that Apple's App Store has ads in it, but that's the only app store allowed. So it seems like maybe iOS is the one that "has ads in the operating system".

fdroid is not part of android.

Right. But the query was whether I can install an app on Android without seeing ads. I can.

> Try installing 1 app without seeing ads for 10 other useless apps.

Not at all. The claim was that there are no ads on android.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44869520

Yeah, I'm not responding to that. I'm responding to your much weaker follow-up that I already quoted.

So you're replying ignoring context? Ok but discussions become kinda meaningless in this way.

Look, there are lots of us using Android and not seeing any ads. So we want to speak up when folks blab on about ads on Android. In reality, iOS and Windows and Android all have ads in their marketplace.

So if you want to have a substantive discussion, it should be centered around the places in the OS where ads are present, whether competing products have ads in similar locations in their OS, and whether those ads can be avoided, both on Android and on other platforms.

My contention is that Android ads are overblown, and generally Android has ads in all the same ways iOS does, and not any more than that. There are of customized versions of Android that add various anti-features, but that's not what I'm focusing on here: I'm focusing on a user's ability to avoid advertising.

But I'm arguing in good faith, and putting in effort to focus on the substantive user experience. I get the feeling you're in this to win some semantic battle with low-effort replies, so I'm going to disengage.

> Haven't installed an app in ages

I haven't used a phone in 10 years and surprisingly I haven't seen any ads on phones for years!

I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade... the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results, that's when I changed my default drive to Linux and have not looked back. I booted to windows on that system twice since (firmware updater). I don't have a Windows drive on my current desktop at all, and my personal laptop is a Macbook. My work laptop is Windows though, the down side is the environment is so locked down, I can't even run WSL or Docker.

Seeing ads/recommendations in app store is miles better than finding out your fresh Windows comes with Candy Crush Saga preinstalled.

As a recovering Candy Crush addict, that's the last thing I need.

Samsung installs a bunch of 3rd-party game apps with every system update. At least they tell you they did and offer to tell you which apps they added.

Samsung doesn't build the OS, but they control it on your device.

On old devices samsung just adds an overlay with ads. I've had to factory reset and keep them not updated.

Is it a regional thing? I've never seen that happen.

Ubuntu had ads in the terminal in 2022: https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-plac...

Unless you're going to call letting users know they have access to onedrive for free an "ad", Microsoft didn't do anything until Windows 11 in 2024.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-t...

Windows 10 is still too fresh in people's mind to gaslight people into thinking there were no ads in it.

2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20121004004109/http://community....

2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151015182852/http://betanews.c...

2015: https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-solitaire-requires-a-subs...

2016: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-...

2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160602204008/http://iskandar.m...

2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20250721092516/https://www.theve...

2018: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/192251/microsoft...

2020: https://winaero.com/wordpad-is-gettings-ads-in-windows-10/

Ubuntu was basically promoting a free benefit to home users. This doesn't seem unreasonable.

Ubuntu lost the spot as the default recommendation to newbies since then. Ads weren't the only reason for that but they are hardly a good excuse for Microsoft's behavior.

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