> mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium

I would hardly notice, TBH.

There are alternatives for all of that.

They haven't been dominant in the gaming market for a long time now. Since the beginning of the last generation (Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch), Microsoft has had the worst selling game consoles. And they are getting weaker with every year: the Xbox director was fired just a few weeks ago.

I think it’s more about how they are perceived. They’re making a lot of money somehow, but they have been losing desktop OS marketshare for at least 15 years, they completely missed mobile, Xbox seems to be failing, they completely gave up on the browser and just threw a skin on Chrome. They have O365 in the enterprise, sure, but that was a market they once owned… now they share it with Google Docs and a host of others. They had to shove Linux into Windows just to get developers to stick around. They had the PC gaming market on lockdown, but Valve is coming for them with all their Linux based efforts… we have PewDiePie as an Arch user now. How bad does Microsoft need to screw up to push someone all the way to Arch? All their consumer facing products seem to be trending down.

Everyone loves to talk about FAANG… there is no M, why not? One would think Microsoft would belong more in that collection than Netflix, yet here we are.

In terms of technology and looking forward, what is Microsoft doing really right? Even their investment in AI seems questionable and they pushed it into their products so hard that everyone hates it. They have GitHub and VS Code, but that was an acquisition and people are always nervous, because they don’t really trust Microsoft based on their track record. Azure is fairly popular, but AWS is still the benchmark everyone talks about. There is their enterprise management software… that helped take Styker completely down last week (maybe not totally Microsoft’s fault and more the admin, but that’s still some really bad press). Did I forget something big?

I think if, 10 years ago, you spun Microsoft into several different companies with everything playing out exactly as it has today in the product management side, the most direct consumer-facing sections like Windows Desktop and Xbox would have cratered and most analysts would say that they have bleak futures, while Azure and 365 would have grossly overperformed and would have been titans.

MS has been successful despite fucking up the monolithic position they held in desktop and gaming, because they managed to find a particularly valuable golden goose. It's just that in doing so they allowed the other golden geese they have to become quite sick.

If you took out cloud rev MS would have been much more motivated to not let the rest of the company's products turn in to the sorry state they're in.

Do you feel they're? As user, not as investor.

Just use µBlock Origin for most of the annoyances, and for the stupid google popup a simple Stylus CSS rule is enough.

Trouble is we cognoscenti know it but the great unwashed do not and or don't give a damn about the fact.

Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.

This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account.

It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory.

Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out.

The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about.

Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.

I hate to say it but you are right. It might be finally time to cut the gcord

I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.

The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail.

Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.

Don't forget that Apple is spying on their users even more then Google does (which is gross in its own). Apple controls much more user data then Google does.

At the same time Apple keeps telling their users some fairy-tales about "privacy".

No, Apple isn't honest. Definitely not.

Just to switch to an even more aggressively monitored and tightly controlled walled garden?

People sometimes act as if the one would be an viable alternative to the other. Even both are effectively the exact same shit for the exact same reasons.

How about we move instead to open systems?

> If Google actually takes away the ability to run unsigned code, my next phone will be an iPhone. And I rarely even run unsigned code.

Same here. If I must be in a walled garden, then I will choose the better kept garden and it sure as hell isn't one of Google's crappy platforms.

The only reason to put up with the shittiness of Android is freedom. The same freedom they keep eroding with their constant, never ending attempts to force remote attestation and sideloading limits.

GrapheneOS is the last hope for Android as far as I'm concerned. Hopefully Google won't find ways to screw that up.

> it might finally result in me fully exiting the Google ecosystem

Don't wait for them to push you away. Start exiting now. Setting up mail on my own domain and distancing myself from gmail is one of the best things I've ever done. Highly recommended.

Buy a cheap unlocked smartphone and run GrapheneOS[0]. I want my smartphone to be like my linux computers where I run them for as long as the hardware works and is still relevant. My iPhone 12 is getting close to its end of life support, yet it is still working well. We should expect better from trillion dollar companies. So I'm not supporting them with dollars wherever I can afford not to. That and I think it's more enjoyable to run something off the beaten path. I like to explore the space a little.

I swapped out my MBP for an Asus Pro Art running linux last year and that's been working out pretty well. Hopefully my cheap motorola phone will be supported by GrapheneOS soon and that will work out too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47241551

One walled garden to a bigger walled garden.

Oops yes you're correct. Edited post and put a note about the correction and a link to my previous post describing the correct details.

But it's only 365 days if you install the app on day 1 of your $99 subscription period.

Every one of BM's episodes is extremely good. Fifty Million Merits has so many parts that show precisely how evil technology can be.

Metaphors have their limits.

In physical world, there’s only so many people who can rob you if you do something stupid (like constantly give away copies of your keys to strangers), they will be very noticeable when they are doing so, and if you feel like something’s off you can always change the lock.

On the Internet, an you are fair game to anyone and everyone in the entire world (where in some jurisdictions even if it’s known precisely who is the figurative robber they wouldn’t face any consequences), you could get pwned as a result of an undirected mass attack, and if you do get pwned you get pwned invisibly and persistently.

Some might say in these circumstances the management company installing a (figurative) biometric lock is warranted, and the most reliable way to stop unsuspecting residents from figuratively giving access to random masked strangers (in exchange for often very minor promised convenience) is to require money to change hands. Of course, that is predicated on that figurative management company 1) constantly upping their defences against tenacious, well-funded adversaries across the globe and 2) themselves being careful about their roster of approved trusted parties, whom they make it easy to grant access to your premises to.

totally my point here. The actual shape of the thing starts mattering so much that at one point your metaphor is just completely useless for judging the actual tradeoffs

Yeah, I predict that "developer mode" will eventually be a setup option in the trust store, so you'd have reset the phone to get to it.

With billions of Android users, there's only millions of people who need or really want this. So like 1%. My point is stop thinking about your mom's windows box and consider the scale.

I have to completely concur that it's probably one step toward an increasingly restrictive final state. Add a few "Are you sure?? You'll brick your phone!!!" warnings, then ID and age-verification mandatory (think of the children!!)

Boiling the scammers and criminals is good.

So install a different ROM

Sounds like backlash needs to continue until it's clear that that isn't acceptable either.

Users don't have to wait 24 hours because Google Play store already has registered developers. Scammers can be held liable when Google knows who the developer of the malicious app is.

Instead the megacorp forces open source licensing, which doesn't solve any of this shit anyway lol

No one is auditing. Behavior analysis works on closed source software too.

This is actually a really interesting problem. Some portion of the public (nerds) are competent to understand what running software even means and the rest (let's call them "sheep") are naive and helpless. A portion of the nerds (Evil Hackers) are easily able to coach any sheep to do any action. Obviously everyone should default to being a Sheep, and obviously it would be ideal if Nerds could have root on their own damn hardware. But how can one ever self-certify that they're actually a Nerd in a way that an Evil Hacker can't coach a Sheep through? "Yes, now at the prompt that says 'Do not use this feature unless you are a software engineer. Especially don't click this button if someone contacts you and asks you to go through this process.'... type 'I am sure I know what I am doing' and click 'Enable dangerous mode.'"

Compared the current paradigm, where you already need to enable developer options, allow installation from untrusted sources, and tap through a warning screen for each apk to be installed?

Maybe 10-20%, generously. The people who are falling for it under current protections clearly are not reading anything they're looking at or thinking about security at all, they've fallen for social engineering scams and sincerely believe they're at imminent risk of being arrested by the FBI or that their adult child is about to be killed. They're in fight or flight mode already, not critical thinking and careful deliberation mode.

If you were to rank everyone by gullibility, these people would largely be clustered in the top 1-2% of most gullible people. There is very little you can do to protect these people, realistically.

> How did they manage to survive as the grandma-account-draining brand for over 15 years, though?

15 years ago ransomware effectively didn't exist and virtually nobody's grandparents did their banking on their phones.

It's for the same reason governments all over started to implement "age verification" laws all of a sudden, they never tell us their real motivation. That we can only speculate on, but for many people it seems they just go along with it and believe them all on face value, that's what all the media does anyway. The overarching goal they all work towards seems to be total control and surveillance of people's information sources and communication.