> 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 — end of 2013), 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.