Sure, but there's a power disparity here. I think the clearest example is smart TVs where there have been examples of consumers buying a TV, and then having ads retroactively added to the product a year later. There's not much a consumer could to avoid that. It's our regulatory environment allowing that.

Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.

Another instance where companies can have more leverage than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing because they work; not giving consumers the option to play Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than building an OS to gamer's preferences.

I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't always good regulators for the market. The market is best regulated by organized entities.

If people stopped buying cigarettes there would be no tobacco industry. But the true cost of smoking is not something that the smoker realizes until it's already too late. That's why we had to have huge public health campaigns to deter people from smoking, because the long-term effects aren't obvious when you're just stopping in at the corner store. We all live in our own little bubbles and it's often difficult to see how our actions, individual and collective, shape the world around us.

So does North Korea's. This is Goodhart's law in action - the metastasis of PM culture rewarding "engagement".

Consumers can make choices only if it is clear what the options are. In many cases, Microsoft hides behind weasel or made up words. And it takes a security researcher to peel back the layers of their bullshit.

Anti trust laws do not generally apply to these situations. The government has had an appetite for antitrust, but the cases are far from a slam dunk. We need modern laws for modern problems.

Breaking up Apple would be glorious. Great hardware without an Orwellian OS on top.

Idk. Our antitrust laws present a high burden of proof and so much subjectivity. The question “Are customers really being hurt?” has to be argued in court (and then argued on appeal at like 3 levels). I think it harms our whole market system, and arguably even harms the capitalist system, to have players with so much power, and the antitrust laws are focused narrowly on proving specific harm mainly in the area of pricing, which isn’t the whole picture.

Too many markets are utterly dominated by one or two big players. I know it’s a tricky problem because market share is hard to define (Does Amazon have 80% share of e-commerce? Or 30% share of all retail?) but I think we would be better off if there were a more aggressive set of rules about anti-competitive behavior that automatically applied to these huge firms, which didn’t rely so much on subjective judgment.

Which requires voting in politicians that would do that. Of course we're much more likely to elect politicians that get the support of billionaires in general so this shit ain't never happ'ning

Mac OS comes with the purchase of the hardware. For mobile and tablets, yes, there is a strict walled garden. But I've been programming on Mac OS for longer than the age of this HN account, and even longer on Linux. In practice there's not much beyond the window manager and containerization that are impractical on Mac for every day programming compared to mainstream Linux distros.

The family computer is set up to boot into Ubuntu; booting into Windows 11 is the exception (games, iTunes).

By friends we mean IT leadership in organizations which really needs to be making the case for MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, or whatever instead of (but more likely in addition to) Windows.

I am only 1 person. FAAMG have reputation management teams/marketing teams that are paid to lie all day.

I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.

Nearly 1 billion PCs have stayed on Windows 10, 42% of the global desktop marketshare is still on 10 despite EOL. Linux has been showing consistent growth on the steam hardware survey as well, and time will tell but I have a feeling the MacBook Neo is going to put another nail in Microsoft's consumer coffin.

The problem for us is that's such a tiny margin of Microsoft's customer base. They aren't a consumer company anymore. For Microsoft to feel the pain, we need the big legacy enterprises to start ripping out Windows (and by extension, rip out Windows Server, Azure, M365).

Us here on HN are in a unique position to help, with many of us having influence on or even the authority to make technical decisions for the companies we work for. Its not enough to stop buying Microsoft at home, we all need to stop buying Microsoft at work.

Sort of related, I think this is why big tech loves “free, ad-supported” so much. Using Google search or YouTube or ChatGPT or Fortnite doesn’t seem like an action that is “supporting a company.” When none of the money comes from your pocket, you don’t really feel like you’re making an important choice to patronize one business or another.

It seems like another tragedy of the commons. Consumers ultimately have the final say in climate impacts by above companies. That isn’t to say consumers are guilt free, but the power of an individual is pretty small

> Consumers have the final say, our economic system fundamentally is consumer spending.

Only if consumers have viable alternatives to choose from. If they don't then what are they supposed to do?

You can do that, but the companies and institutions built on Windows will still keep paying whatever it costs for Active Directory, and thus all the bundled software that comes with it.

Individual consumer action does not a monopoly break.