Let's break up both of their monopolies!
Both of these companies played dirty to get on top, both hide money in tax havens. They both stiffle innovation.
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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They can be monopolies in their respective industries. They are not directly competing in hardware or services in their most profitable products.
Duopolies are also an issue
Microsoft is a wonderful success story that being one of the first, and being parasitic, anti-competitive and anti-consumer, all while failing upwards by having some of the buggiest production releases out there on increasingly bloated software, is all that really counts to Wall Street.
And most of the world is too afraid to split off from it because it’s what they know.
And most of the world is too afraid to split off from it because it’s what they know.
It doesn't help that superior choices to Microsoft product keep getting bought by even worse competitors making Microsoft, once again, look not as as it might. Such events like:
- IBM buying Red Hat and enacting the death of Centos
- Broadcom buying VMware
It's almost as if there might be a common driver behind both phenomena.
Meh, I think it’s a stretch to blame IBM for the Centos thing. Red Hat did that on their own and themselves deserve whatever criticism is warranted. It’s a wholly owned but independent subsidiary, so not like IBM is in the middle management chain at all.
I think it's the exact opposite.
Microsoft was arguably the most powerful company in the world when they were hit with the antitrust lawsuit which absolutely crushed the company. It was never going to destroy Microsoft, but it knocked them way down and things were looking pretty grim.
They cleaned up their act, have been making great decisions for the last 20 years and are now a far bigger and better company than they ever were in the old days. I think that's proof that being "parasitic, anti-competitive and anti-consumer" was a bad strategy.
They’ve learned forgotten more lessons than they’ll ever remember.
In the last 10 years we still see these behaviours by way of:
- changing over to a subscription model for office then dropping support for older versions to basically force people to move to their new model, locking many prior VLSC or on-premises exchange features behind very high subscriptions
- after releasing the new version of the edge browser are now using their integration in their software suite to disregard the user’s default browser choice and open in edge anyway. Having to now go through an extra menu set to tell their software to respect the default browser set in the OS
- lying about Win 10 being the final version of windows only to turn around and add a TPM requirement which automatically disqualifies a significant amount of hardware from being able to upgrade
This is just three examples off the top of my head, respectively. We could talk about ads in a paid OS, constant nags to please pretty please use their browser, breaking prior software to integrate “new” versions that don’t add any user improvements but do add significant upgrades to telemetry and usage data, and so on.
$100 billion is a narrow enough gap to make news? That is a direct threat to the public.
- Buy all the companies
- Become the largest company
Is this supposed to be surprising?
When they're both doing it, there is some kind of a fucked-up competition at least.
Define "valuable"? Like... For the shareholders or for society?
You don't find the ads in Windows 11 valuable?
As a Windows 10 user aiming to switch to Linux, I will miss out on that value. How will I ever survive? 😢
Windows 10 has the same ads as 11 so you're not missing out on anything.
I have no idea why people suddenly love Windows 10 now that there's something newer to hate on, despite them being the same bullshit just a slightly different skin.
Windows 10 works with little to no intervention needed from the user and there is a metric fuckton of available software. The only time I ever had to chase a driver down was for an audio to USB recording interface that the last driver written was for Win 7, and 10 runs it in legacy mode flawlessly. Did I mention the metric fuckton of available software. 10 has never given us anything to hate but how often it updates, but 11 tries like hell to bully it's way onto computers it wasn't invited to. And if you do get stuck with it, none of the shit is where you expect it to be. The UI is ugly and clumsy. And you can't revert. And what box did you check that Win 10 is advertising at you?
Just wondering: what ads?
I've seen some stuff about ads when installing Windows (about personalisation of ads), but other than suggested apps after a fresh install (certain games and apps). I've never seen any ads in windows itself.
Granted, I do offline installs without Microsoft accounts and do use stuff like ShutUp10 and Windows debloater.
"Parasitically creating a strangle-hold on our entire society and much of its economy, heavily stifling choice and daily making people struggle, even those who don't purchase any of their products, all for their own greed."
Oh wait no, I read from the wrong page, but you are right, it's: "create wealth for their shareholders", yeah that's the ticket. :-D
Bonus points for getting many middle-class people to be complicit, by adding a layer of indirection so that they don't even know where their stock is located, only that it performs AT ANY COST (or else is sold & others that DO are purchased in their stead). That way the younger generations do not have to care for the elderly, b/c the stock market is doing that for them. Yay capitalism!:-)
That's the market capitalization so the definition is pretty clear
Whoever wins, we are fucked
No value to me, perhaps a determent.