6 ms·

Which Tech Giant Would You Drop?

57 points by Deinos 9y ago

Entangled 9y ago
Dropped microsoft fifteen years ago and never looked back. Dropped facebook seven years ago. Google is still useful but got bitten in my pockets by adsense so they are in my watch list. Mozilla, Amazon, Apple in high esteem but could be more user friendly and more innovative in their fields. Big media and big telcos, I don't care. Twitter, snapchat, instagram, never used them, don't care about social fads. What else?
supercoder 9y ago
Easy, Amazon. They don't make anything.
- dryajov 9y ago
  What about AWS?
  - axonic 9y ago
    I'd call it just another vendor lock-in. Frankly I'm sick of the AWS clone army constantly preaching that spinning up an ECx instance is a better answer than learning "hard stuff" or looking at me like I have a dick growing out of my forehead for not using AWS. Generally it seems to make people lazy and dependent. I don't use it, and will not recommend it because I care about my customers' businesses. Every other 'benevolent' service I can think of which scaled up like that has become a malignant tumor I wish I had never had dealings with. I guess I just won't trust Napoleonic companies again, no matter how nice they may seem. Market share discrimination? lol maybe, but still less fascist than how we rate e-commerce risks, no?
- santaclaus 9y ago
  They make Alexa voice tubes and kindles and tv boxes and tv shows. (I'm probably missing a few things)
  - benchaney 9y ago
    They also do distribution. Granted that isn't something they "make", but it is still a legitimate service.
- gnodar 9y ago
  Maybe not many products that end up on your doorstep, but they dominate in supply chain management. It's a very high and expensive barrier for any startup who would want to compete with Amazon.
- flareback 9y ago
  They make my life easier because because I don't have to drive to the store.
cdransf 9y ago
Facebook.
dryajov 9y ago
I think this is an unconstructive question. We better ask ourselfs what can we replace them with that is fundamentally better?
- ptr_void 9y ago
  I think, people doesn't necessarily hate the product, they hate the business model. However, I don't have any realistic replacement business model to offer.
  - dryajov 9y ago
    I think some of the fundamental shortcomings could and will be replaced/fixed by decentralization/distribution which is actively being worked on with projects like ipfs and ethereum.
- bobajeff 9y ago
  Yes besides I would drop all of them. I've been mulling over lately how tired I am of dealing with their behavior: Spying on me, Removing features I need, Dropping support for hardware I use, Anti-user defaults, User lock-in schemes, Intentionally converting users into addicts, turning products into services, restricting my use of my software and media. Makes me want to give up using computers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
StavrosK 9y ago
Weird, I don't really use any of those companies. I switched away from Google (although I guess I still use Android and Maps, so not entirely), I don't own anything Apple makes, I don't buy things or rent services from Amazon, and I haven't used anything Microsoft in years. I sometimes use Facebook to talk to non-close friends, although I do use Whatsapp daily, so I guess that counts too. All in all, I don't think it's impossible to escape at least one of them.
- mathperson 9y ago
  what search engine do you use?
  - flareback 9y ago
    duckduckgo
    - robryan 9y ago
      Would DuckDuckGo be viable though without the Bing API?
- nimchimpsky 9y ago
  Obviously it's not impossible, but you just listed out how you use all of them. You guess Android counts, well of course it does.
  - roblabla 9y ago
    I actually finally managed to divorce most of my data (apart from search) from google. I'm running LineageOS without gapps, using microG for the play services. Geolocalisation is done with a service provided by mozilla (which I trust a lot more), and it's been working great for now. For the maps app, I use OSMand, and eventually, I hope to use my own backend for GCM (though that will require some changes to microG). My contacts and calendar are synchronized with a webdav server called radicale that I self-host. I also self-host my own mail with a postfix+dovecot setup. Really, the last remaining google service I use is google search. And I've hit a brick wall there. The alternatives just suck too much. DDG's search result has been consistently terrible, and while I still hope qwant will one day turn into a great product, right now the search result are still significantly poorer than google's. Android doesn't count with a setup similar to mine, because it's all open source and doesn't communicate with google outside of expectations :).
mrdodge 9y ago
I haven't used anything Microsoft in 5 years.
- therealmarv 9y ago
  I tried to achieve the same. But still need to use Skype for some work contacts. And for first time in many years I felt in love with a MS product: VSCode (well it is coded by a very talented sub branch from MS in Switzerland). So nowadays I'm coding Linux production software on a Mac with a Microsoft editor ;)
  - ianai 9y ago
    I bought a win7 laptop after owning nothing MS related for a decade just to "freshen up".
- threeseed 9y ago
  I hadn't either but this year signed up for Office 365. Outlook is fantastic on iOS/OSX, OneDrive is much better implemented than Google Drive/Dropbox and OneNote is much more useful to me than Evernote. Microsoft's release cadence is also fantastic. They are constantly releasing updates all of which contain features/bug fixes that are voted on by users. You can't ask for anything more than that.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    I haven't had the chance to use OneDrive. What things does it do better than Google Drive?
- monk_e_boy 9y ago
  I got Win 10 and I quite like it. Apart from the start menu. And the adverts on the start menu. And how slow cortana is. And how slow search is. And adverts in explorer. And adverts for Edge. And how one drive crashes every 5 minutes. And how it won't log me on 50% of the time. And how control panel is somehow split into seven or eight different apps. And the random HD thrashing. Windows is definitely getting better.
grandalf 9y ago
warning: paywall
jacques_chester 9y ago
> Which Tech Giant Would You Drop? I guess Google, since they're indirectly the most responsible for clickbait headlines.
northwest65 9y ago
Definitely Amazon. As a customer from New Zealand, their online shopping site is almost impossible to purchase from (any item I look at does not ship here), and some of their practices are so misleading as to be illegal in my country ('one click' buy X at price $Y, which when billed then includes another $Z for freight). Never again.
- nitemice 9y ago
  That might soon change for those who want it, if they set up shop in Aus as they've been speculated to be doing for some time now.
- therealmarv 9y ago
  Why blame a shop which is not really operating in or near your country? It's also not NZ law they need to follow. But I would also stay away from one buy IMHO... you can cancel always (if no digital goods) and you are fast enough.
  - northwest65 9y ago
    Because all of my other favourite shopping sites (specifically AliExpress) that don't operate in or near my country are able to communicate what I can and can't buy, and clearly show me the shipping price on the product page (i.e. no other click through, or worse, not telling me I can't buy it till the bloody checkout screen) just fine. Actually whilst I'm having a bitch about the abysmal user experience on Amazon, here's another: Don't let me fill my cart with things I can't buy (after I already selected my shipping address before even started to add items), and then tell me hey this item can't be shipped to your location, which I then remove, only to be told hey this item also can't be shipped to your location. Repeat for all the items. Just tell me all the god damn items that can't be shipped at once, or shit how about this for a trip... maybe don't let me add them in the first place. /rant
    - therealmarv 9y ago
      Well I agree that the Amazon shipping information for international orders is not very clear. At least you can ship some things internationally... many other shops refuse to ship internationally altogether
Roritharr 9y ago
Facebook
- flareback 9y ago
  agreed.
  - ianai 9y ago
    Facebook, to me, is the worst to use. It's a mental hazard.
johan_larson 9y ago
Facebook. I don't use them. Never did.
lpolovets 9y ago
I'm surprised that only 10% of people would drop Apple first. I would have guessed that way more than 10% of people don't own a single Apple product. I wonder if maybe the NYT's readership is biased toward Apple owners? (My ranking: I'd drop Apple and MSFT easily since I don't use anything by either company. FB would be easy to drop but I do use it and would miss it a little. Amazon and Google would be significantly more work to let go of.)
- brogrammernot 9y ago
  Between iTunes and iPhones they have a massive market share.
  - lpolovets 9y ago
    Agree, but do you think it's 90% market share? I'd guess it's 20%-40% (in the US). That's just my gut feeling though, and not based on data. Edit: Found some data. https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple-users-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple... Suggests 30% of Americans have an iPhone. Not sure what iTunes usage is like.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      Again. You're continuing to draw conclusions from poor source data. A New York Times poll that possibly has only been posted here is always going to skew more towards Apple users who are typically more affluent and higher educated.
    - megablast 9y ago
      90% market share of NYTimes readers? Believable.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Apple Music has been growing at a pretty decent rate so that would account for quite a lot of users. Also it's 10% of people who viewed this page. It's not representative or particularly meaningful to make broader conclusions from.
nitemice 9y ago
I don't want to 'drop' Google, but I distrust them enough to want a escape plan, should things get bad. Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever migrate away. I don't use any Apple stuff, except vary rarely iTunes for music purchases, because I've still got credit there from ~5yrs ago. Amazon have little to no presence in Australia currently, but that could change. I'd love to get away from Facebook, but as previously discussed[1], my nooby friends are the main thing holding me back. Microsoft seem to have mostly picked up their game in recent years, so I have no problem with sticking with them. That said, I refused to fully integrate like I have with Google (mail, calendar, etc.), because their products just don't seem to work as well. [1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083)
- ionised 9y ago
  > Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever migrate away. It's actually very easy, and once you do you'll realise Google's significance in your life is seriously overestimated.
jfaucett 9y ago
This was interesting. It made me think about which services each provider has that I personally would really miss if they were to suddenly dissappear tomorrow, and the only one that would have a big negative effect would be google maps. I don't use facebook at all. I can count the things I've ordered on amazon (in all 30+ years of my life) on one hand. I don't use microsoft or apple products unless I'm forced to because of some work related project. And this isn't even out of any crazy principles or anything. I simply like linux distros better than apple/msft. I use an android phone but mainly just the phone functionality personally (i.e. like a good ol nokia + gmaps). Funny, I would of thought it would have effected me personally a lot more, especially me being a software developer and all. But honestly it would make my life a lot easier, then cross-platform would be just linux :)
CM30 9y ago
As someone who doesn't particularly like social networking sites, and especially dislikes Facebook compared to other social networks... I'd drop Facebook first. Heck, I only joined because I had to in order to add a page for a business I was working with. Apple I could drop pretty easily too. An iPhone is nice, but it's not exactly the be all and end all. Any old Android phone could work well too. Amazon... personally I'd be able to drop it easily, though most people would have more trouble there. That's because nowadays the products I mostly buy from there are computer accessories and games, and the latter is under serious competition from the likes of Steam, various digital download stores on consoles and even the companies themselves selling boxed versions. Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance. Microsoft would be tough, simply because Microsoft Office is really important to me, and I'm really used to Windows at this point. Google is arguably the toughest one to drop. Why? Mix of services needed (it's damn hard to promote a website about certain subjects without YouTube nowadays, and Gmail is very convenient) and the fact their alternatives are just nowhere near as good for a search engine. Which is depressing given how far downhill Google's own search results have gone recently... But yeah, interesting to see the stats there.
- Antrikshy 9y ago
  > Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance. I sometimes buy groceries on those sites, but not all of it; only the things I don't need immediately but will soon (and if it doesn't have weirdly high pricing on it). I also usually use Prime Now and not Amazon.com.
- gutnor 9y ago
  > I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? As a foreigner, Amazon ( and others ) offers food that is simply not accessible in the local supermarket. All the food that requires a trip to a larger supermarket or a specific shop ? For example, my last buy was some sort of pasta that is difficult to find in London. I'm 100% certain I could find it in some Italian shop. I'm 80% certain at least 1 of the major supermarket stock at their largest store. To find out, I would need to explore the city. I don't want that pasta enough to dedicate a whole week-end to search for it. Alternatively, I can use internet and the first results are generally a shop that offers delivery. Again I don't want to dedicate a significant part of my we to go to that shop to buy 4 GBP worth of pasta.
BadassFractal 9y ago
I stopped using Facebook and Twitter for a few months. Once the initial pains of withdrawal subsided, I couldn't even remember that was something I wanted to check. Don't need either one of them.
nstart 9y ago
Fascinating to see that people choose to drop fb first in most cases. I'm wondering how many are considering WhatsApp as part of fb. In my case I could drop fb and Instagram tomorrow. WhatsApp? That'd be really really really hard to just drop out of touch with family or force them to install something else.
- fooey 9y ago
  The only things I use from Facebook are React and GraphQL. I don't care about any of their services, at all.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Lots of people, including myself, barely know what WhatsApp is.
- what_ever 9y ago
  Pretty easy to just switch to Telegram. There are tons of messaging apps that use phone number as identity. Signal, WeChat (I think?), Allo, Hike to name a few.
- Jare 9y ago
  WhatsApp is huge in Europe but any other IM app could replace it in a matter of weeks if necessary.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 9y ago
I ranked in order of how easy it would be to get equivalent services elsewhere. Amazon is a particularly good ecommerce site, but by no means alone in its class, and there are plenty of IaaS providers. (Getting locked in to AWS specific products is a bad idea anyway). Microsoft products already have superior competitors on the marketplace. Retooling and retraining the entire business IT world will cost something, but it needs to happen anyway. People have been trying to replace Facebook since it started; some new entrant will supplant it overnight. No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I think it would take a long time for someone to replace its offerings with equivalently polished products, if it ever even happens (the demand for cheap stuff might be so strong that Apple is only viable because of brand inertia). I'd miss it. Alphabet is unmatched in search, drive, email, and Bell Labs-style R&D moonshots. I doubt it's repeatable outside of the specific time and place from which it emerged.
- falcolas 9y ago
  > No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I would dare say that Microsoft is encroaching on this slowly but surely. Between the Surface, Surface book, the upcoming niche desktop PC, and air-esque laptop, they are steadily coming up with compelling offerings that are eating into Apple's space. Google's Pixel devices are also squeezing Apple, though mostly in the mobile market.
flukus 9y ago
From the perspective of what the impact would be if these companies disappear: Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to. Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work. Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.
gremlinsinc 9y ago
My order was : 1. FB (because it doesn't serve any really important meaningful purpose... I much prefer reddit), 2. Apple: Because I hate apple products and their closed walled gardens when it comes to building apps and things (I'm android/linux desktop user). 3. MS: DOn't much use any of their products anymore, but did for a long time, and if I were to leave linux I'd probably go back to windows, since I like custom built computers. 4. Amazon: Love amazon, great deals - only place I shop, but if they didn't exist I'd probably find somewhere else using google. 5. Alphabet: Self-driving cars, android, youtube, gmail, search (I've tried bing, etc... but no other search provider gives the quality of results -- esp for coding questions), and they're even my isp: Google FIBER... so yeah this one would be a hard one to sever for me.
- Antrikshy 9y ago
  I feel like this is the exact order most people will drop them in.
- ge96 9y ago
  I kind of don't understand why people would drop these, who else would take over? I realize you don't want monopolies, want competition to bring out innovation. But at the same what else do you have left from the internet unless your life isn't already heavily integrated with these services. edit: I don't have an Apple product myself. Though the build quality is nice, it's expensive (and I am poor) also never used/could be confusing to use iOS/Mac OS. Use Gmail... but you can use hotmail (microsoft), Yahoo (yikes). Chrome browser (google) ... Youtube (google) ahh you can use Vimeo... Don't use Facebook (don't have friends) though their marketing/advertising for a business is great. Just my useless opinion
- BigJono 9y ago
  I'm interested how reddit of all things acts as a replacement for Facebook. What do you use for IMing, group chats, organising events and sharing jokes (memes?) between friends? I'd imagine those are the main use cases of FB for most people. Nobody I know cares in the slightest about the news feed, it's just private groups and messenger.
big_spammer 9y ago
I dropped all except Amazon, because books are cheaper there. The cockroach is Amazon. Google was surprisingly easy to drop. I use DuckDuckGo and quit GMail. Microsoft I dropped more than a decade ago. I never used Facebook. I half-dropped Apple by switching away from Mac OS X, but I still own in iPhone that I'll drop when it breaks.
thablackbull 9y ago
In order of what I could easily/already drop: Facebook: Never had Facebook Apple: Don't use any Apple products Alphabet (Google): 90%+ searches are now through DuckDuckGo for me Amazon: Needed as online shopping often through Amazon, and I still buy a lot of books through them Microsoft: Must have, my life is intimately tied to Excel
jcranmer 9y ago
For me, the hard choice was whether to drop Facebook or Apple first, and then whether to drop Microsoft or Google last. I don't really use either Facebook or Apple (or Amazon either, I guess, but Amazon ended up in the "no opinion" category more than anything else)--I've not looked at Facebook in months, and I've not posted anything in years, and the newest Apple product I own is well over a decade old. Ultimately, I'd drop Facebook first largely because I see Apple as still providing some value-add, whereas it's hard to see any value-add from Facebook. I ultimately dropped Microsoft last because they're the only ones who have made decent office productivity software (I say this having used both Corel's stuff long ago and LibreOffice for several years). For all of the visualization stuff that the NYT does, I'm surprised that the visualization here is pretty sucky. Only bar graphs of the top and bottom choices? Really? That's the most you could come up with?
blfr 9y ago
I have never really used Apple or Facebook much, dropped Microsoft years ago, loss of support for my Kindle would be at most a minor inconvenience but Google? Crippling. I use G Suite both privately and at work, basically run my life via Calendar/Maps/Keep, and get a nervous twitch in my left eye just at the thought of what a massive hassle it would be to first switch, and very likely second -- maintain the alternative. That's even before I consider that there would be no Google to turn to when configuring that alternative, that my phone would essentially become a Nokia E52 with a larger screen (no Google Apps, no Uber without Google Maps, not even the local bus/directions app would work, not sure about Signal), and I that would need to dig up a ton of data from a cold, cold storage. On a lighter note, NYT is now writing HN-tailored clickbait. We captured the zeitgeist.
tbabb 9y ago
- Facebook I think does more harm to the world on the whole (basically a chain-letter conveyor belt for a majority of the public), but slight good to me personally (able to keep in touch with people that would otherwise have disappeared from my life), so it was a toss-up of interpretation whether to dump it first or second. - Killing MSFT would do a lot of short-term economic damage, but the new innovation that happens to fill its place would probably be an easy net boon. Linux would be a fast replacement, and it would probably force that ecosystem to blossom. As someone who doesn't use any MSFT products (I have no need for them), I wouldn't personally suffer at all. - Amazon is the center of online commerce, but I think it's already a fat, complacent company. Their infrastructure is famously good, but the purchasing experience is crap. Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online experience, and the recommendations are laughably bad. What takes its place would necessarily be much better. - Apple's products are still a force of pressure on the market to innovate, though I suspect that will not be true for much longer. Their latest products are less clearly better than the competition, and they've made some bizarre design blunders. My next phone/laptop will likely not be Apple, so once their innovation dries up, seeing them disappear probably wouldn't make much of a difference in my life. - Google and Gmail are still unparalleled. One could imagine something better than Gmail, but Google search is so core and effortless it's hard to picture what an improvement would look like. Deleting google would break the internet.
- Nition 9y ago
  > Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online experience I can't believe that after all these years and all the engineers they must have, sorting a category by top rated still puts an item with one review and 5 stars above a product with 10,000 reviews and an average of 4.9 stars.
  - premrajnarkhede 9y ago
    OMG! so true! I have been going with popularity as sorting parameter and screening low rated products myself
Yetanfou 9y ago
1: Facebook, no question there. I never had an account, nor do I ever plan on getting one. This is one company I'd like to be rid of, please. 2: Amazon, there's plenty of other options and - at least in Europe - I don't see any specific advantage to Amazon anyway. 3: Apple, overpriced lifestyle is not my style and I don't particularly like their attitude in many ways, nor do I like the idea of them having enough cash to buy a small country. It is not so much that I begrudge them their success but that I wonder what that power will eventually be used for. 4: Microsoft, using Linux since 1992, OS/2 before that, another company I won't miss having around. Having said that, as long as Apple is around I'd like to keep Microsoft alive as well, just like I wanted Apple to be there to make sure Microsoft did not gain a 100% stranglehold on mainstream personal computing. 5: Alphabet - or should I just say Google. I use some of their products in 'customised' form, Android without Google-proprietary stuff, the search engine without persistent cookies. I don't have a Google account though so I'm not tied to them by more than a search setting in a browser (Seamonkey, Firefox, Chromium, ...). There are other search engines, there are other mobile operating systems.
- midnitewarrior 9y ago
  Don't forget that Microsoft was a top Linux code contributor for awhile, and that OS/2 was a partnership between IBM and Microsoft. Microsoft is everywhere.
dmourati 9y ago
Microsoft and Facebook are the obvious easy ones for me. The next three are far more interesting as I use each on a daily basis.
ruytlm 9y ago
5. Microsoft. Could arguably live without Windows and Office (via either OSX or Linux), but at present it underpins all that I do on a computer. 4. Alphabet. Alphabet/Google products are the next layer I use on top of MS products, therefore are the next hardest to remove. 3. Facebook. The next layer again; MS and Alphabet provide general case tools, FB is a particular implementation on top of those, so it would go before either of the above two. 2. Amazon. No Amazon in Australia anyway, no big loss. 1. Apple. Only Apple product/service I use is a keyboard. Happy to see it go.
Spooky23 9y ago
The easiest to drop for me would be Facebook and Amazon. I enjoy Apple and Google. products and don't see a need to drop. Microsoft doesn't have a big impact on my personal life anymore. It wouldn't be feasible to remove them fro, my personal life, however.
JoshMnem 9y ago
> Could you ditch them? Yes, of course. All of them. I was alive before those companies existed, and life was more pleasant then in many ways. I already use Linux. Google Search is a difficult one to replace in this line of work. Google Maps is especially useful for people who tend to get lost, but I think it's also bad for people's brains, because it takes cognitive load off of the brain's navigation system, which is required for many cognitive tasks, including memory.* In any case, there would be other mapping companies to fill the space. * It still needs more research, but this is interesting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm
ionised 9y ago
I chose Facebook as my number 1 and Alphabet as my number 2. He then goes on to rant about how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is and how difficult my life must be not using Google services. The contrary is true. It's very easy not to use Google services and they are very replaceable.
- falcolas 9y ago
  > how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is > It's very easy not to use Google services Both can be true. Which is more true for you depends on how much of the ecosystem you (and your peers) use. For example, the previous startup I worked for used Google services quite extensively. Chat, hangouts, documents, spreadsheets, drive, email, calendar, even YouTube... the cost of moving off would have been quite significant, for very little benefit. The company before that didn't use Google at all, and instead used IRC, NFS/SMB servers, and private MX servers. They functioned fine, though many of the non-tech users were beginning to grumbling about the benefits of moving to Google (because that was what they were familiar with). There's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy which always comes up when talking about moving off Google, but that doesn't mean the cost of replacing everything Google provides is anywhere near zero - especially when it comes to convenience. In a way, Google's offerings have become the new Microsoft Office suite - used not because they're the best at any one thing, but because of all the value provided by everything together, and the familiarity of incoming users with that suite.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
First drop for me is easily Microsoft. I have a gaming PC, and I keep it booted in Ubuntu unless a game requires Windows. I'm pretty sure I could boot into Windows less often if I used WINE, but I don't currently wanna deal with that hassle. The only other tools from Microsoft that I follow are TypeScript and Visual Studio Code, but I'm happily using Flow and WebStorm. Second drop would definitely be Facebook. I feel like my Facebook feed is largely full of shitty memes. It'd be annoying to lose Messenger, but most of the contacts I regularly speak with are available through other means of communication. If I were closing my account I'd probably message a bunch of people to make sure I have their alternative contact info. I don't think I'd be able to easily drop React and Flow. Migrating away from their ecosystem would be incredibly challenging for me. I can't drop Amazon, Apple, or Google.

57 points by Deinos 9y ago

Dropped microsoft fifteen years ago and never looked back. Dropped facebook seven years ago. Google is still useful but got bitten in my pockets by adsense so they are in my watch list. Mozilla, Amazon, Apple in high esteem but could be more user friendly and more innovative in their fields. Big media and big telcos, I don't care. Twitter, snapchat, instagram, never used them, don't care about social fads. What else?

supercoder 9y ago

Easy, Amazon. They don't make anything.

dryajov 9y ago
What about AWS?
- axonic 9y ago
  I'd call it just another vendor lock-in. Frankly I'm sick of the AWS clone army constantly preaching that spinning up an ECx instance is a better answer than learning "hard stuff" or looking at me like I have a dick growing out of my forehead for not using AWS. Generally it seems to make people lazy and dependent. I don't use it, and will not recommend it because I care about my customers' businesses. Every other 'benevolent' service I can think of which scaled up like that has become a malignant tumor I wish I had never had dealings with. I guess I just won't trust Napoleonic companies again, no matter how nice they may seem. Market share discrimination? lol maybe, but still less fascist than how we rate e-commerce risks, no?
santaclaus 9y ago
They make Alexa voice tubes and kindles and tv boxes and tv shows. (I'm probably missing a few things)
- benchaney 9y ago
  They also do distribution. Granted that isn't something they "make", but it is still a legitimate service.
gnodar 9y ago
Maybe not many products that end up on your doorstep, but they dominate in supply chain management. It's a very high and expensive barrier for any startup who would want to compete with Amazon.
flareback 9y ago
They make my life easier because because I don't have to drive to the store.

cdransf 9y ago

Facebook.

dryajov 9y ago

I think this is an unconstructive question. We better ask ourselfs what can we replace them with that is fundamentally better?

ptr_void 9y ago
I think, people doesn't necessarily hate the product, they hate the business model. However, I don't have any realistic replacement business model to offer.
- dryajov 9y ago
  I think some of the fundamental shortcomings could and will be replaced/fixed by decentralization/distribution which is actively being worked on with projects like ipfs and ethereum.
bobajeff 9y ago
Yes besides I would drop all of them. I've been mulling over lately how tired I am of dealing with their behavior: Spying on me, Removing features I need, Dropping support for hardware I use, Anti-user defaults, User lock-in schemes, Intentionally converting users into addicts, turning products into services, restricting my use of my software and media. Makes me want to give up using computers.

deleted 9y ago

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StavrosK 9y ago

Weird, I don't really use any of those companies. I switched away from Google (although I guess I still use Android and Maps, so not entirely), I don't own anything Apple makes, I don't buy things or rent services from Amazon, and I haven't used anything Microsoft in years. I sometimes use Facebook to talk to non-close friends, although I do use Whatsapp daily, so I guess that counts too. All in all, I don't think it's impossible to escape at least one of them.

mathperson 9y ago
what search engine do you use?
- flareback 9y ago
  duckduckgo
  - robryan 9y ago
    Would DuckDuckGo be viable though without the Bing API?
nimchimpsky 9y ago
Obviously it's not impossible, but you just listed out how you use all of them. You guess Android counts, well of course it does.
- roblabla 9y ago
  I actually finally managed to divorce most of my data (apart from search) from google. I'm running LineageOS without gapps, using microG for the play services. Geolocalisation is done with a service provided by mozilla (which I trust a lot more), and it's been working great for now. For the maps app, I use OSMand, and eventually, I hope to use my own backend for GCM (though that will require some changes to microG). My contacts and calendar are synchronized with a webdav server called radicale that I self-host. I also self-host my own mail with a postfix+dovecot setup. Really, the last remaining google service I use is google search. And I've hit a brick wall there. The alternatives just suck too much. DDG's search result has been consistently terrible, and while I still hope qwant will one day turn into a great product, right now the search result are still significantly poorer than google's. Android doesn't count with a setup similar to mine, because it's all open source and doesn't communicate with google outside of expectations :).

mrdodge 9y ago

I haven't used anything Microsoft in 5 years.

therealmarv 9y ago
I tried to achieve the same. But still need to use Skype for some work contacts. And for first time in many years I felt in love with a MS product: VSCode (well it is coded by a very talented sub branch from MS in Switzerland). So nowadays I'm coding Linux production software on a Mac with a Microsoft editor ;)
- ianai 9y ago
  I bought a win7 laptop after owning nothing MS related for a decade just to "freshen up".
threeseed 9y ago
I hadn't either but this year signed up for Office 365. Outlook is fantastic on iOS/OSX, OneDrive is much better implemented than Google Drive/Dropbox and OneNote is much more useful to me than Evernote. Microsoft's release cadence is also fantastic. They are constantly releasing updates all of which contain features/bug fixes that are voted on by users. You can't ask for anything more than that.
- euyyn 9y ago
  I haven't had the chance to use OneDrive. What things does it do better than Google Drive?
monk_e_boy 9y ago
I got Win 10 and I quite like it. Apart from the start menu. And the adverts on the start menu. And how slow cortana is. And how slow search is. And adverts in explorer. And adverts for Edge. And how one drive crashes every 5 minutes. And how it won't log me on 50% of the time. And how control panel is somehow split into seven or eight different apps. And the random HD thrashing. Windows is definitely getting better.

grandalf 9y ago

warning: paywall

jacques_chester 9y ago

> Which Tech Giant Would You Drop? I guess Google, since they're indirectly the most responsible for clickbait headlines.

northwest65 9y ago

Definitely Amazon. As a customer from New Zealand, their online shopping site is almost impossible to purchase from (any item I look at does not ship here), and some of their practices are so misleading as to be illegal in my country ('one click' buy X at price $Y, which when billed then includes another $Z for freight). Never again.

nitemice 9y ago
That might soon change for those who want it, if they set up shop in Aus as they've been speculated to be doing for some time now.
therealmarv 9y ago
Why blame a shop which is not really operating in or near your country? It's also not NZ law they need to follow. But I would also stay away from one buy IMHO... you can cancel always (if no digital goods) and you are fast enough.
- northwest65 9y ago
  Because all of my other favourite shopping sites (specifically AliExpress) that don't operate in or near my country are able to communicate what I can and can't buy, and clearly show me the shipping price on the product page (i.e. no other click through, or worse, not telling me I can't buy it till the bloody checkout screen) just fine. Actually whilst I'm having a bitch about the abysmal user experience on Amazon, here's another: Don't let me fill my cart with things I can't buy (after I already selected my shipping address before even started to add items), and then tell me hey this item can't be shipped to your location, which I then remove, only to be told hey this item also can't be shipped to your location. Repeat for all the items. Just tell me all the god damn items that can't be shipped at once, or shit how about this for a trip... maybe don't let me add them in the first place. /rant
  - therealmarv 9y ago
    Well I agree that the Amazon shipping information for international orders is not very clear. At least you can ship some things internationally... many other shops refuse to ship internationally altogether

Roritharr 9y ago

Facebook

flareback 9y ago
agreed.
- ianai 9y ago
  Facebook, to me, is the worst to use. It's a mental hazard.

johan_larson 9y ago

Facebook. I don't use them. Never did.

lpolovets 9y ago

I'm surprised that only 10% of people would drop Apple first. I would have guessed that way more than 10% of people don't own a single Apple product. I wonder if maybe the NYT's readership is biased toward Apple owners? (My ranking: I'd drop Apple and MSFT easily since I don't use anything by either company. FB would be easy to drop but I do use it and would miss it a little. Amazon and Google would be significantly more work to let go of.)

brogrammernot 9y ago
Between iTunes and iPhones they have a massive market share.
- lpolovets 9y ago
  Agree, but do you think it's 90% market share? I'd guess it's 20%-40% (in the US). That's just my gut feeling though, and not based on data. Edit: Found some data. https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple-users-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232790/forecast-of-apple... Suggests 30% of Americans have an iPhone. Not sure what iTunes usage is like.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Again. You're continuing to draw conclusions from poor source data. A New York Times poll that possibly has only been posted here is always going to skew more towards Apple users who are typically more affluent and higher educated.
  - megablast 9y ago
    90% market share of NYTimes readers? Believable.
threeseed 9y ago
Apple Music has been growing at a pretty decent rate so that would account for quite a lot of users. Also it's 10% of people who viewed this page. It's not representative or particularly meaningful to make broader conclusions from.

nitemice 9y ago

I don't want to 'drop' Google, but I distrust them enough to want a escape plan, should things get bad. Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever migrate away. I don't use any Apple stuff, except vary rarely iTunes for music purchases, because I've still got credit there from ~5yrs ago. Amazon have little to no presence in Australia currently, but that could change. I'd love to get away from Facebook, but as previously discussed[1], my nooby friends are the main thing holding me back. Microsoft seem to have mostly picked up their game in recent years, so I have no problem with sticking with them. That said, I refused to fully integrate like I have with Google (mail, calendar, etc.), because their products just don't seem to work as well. [1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083)

ionised 9y ago
> Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever migrate away. It's actually very easy, and once you do you'll realise Google's significance in your life is seriously overestimated.

jfaucett 9y ago

This was interesting. It made me think about which services each provider has that I personally would really miss if they were to suddenly dissappear tomorrow, and the only one that would have a big negative effect would be google maps. I don't use facebook at all. I can count the things I've ordered on amazon (in all 30+ years of my life) on one hand. I don't use microsoft or apple products unless I'm forced to because of some work related project. And this isn't even out of any crazy principles or anything. I simply like linux distros better than apple/msft. I use an android phone but mainly just the phone functionality personally (i.e. like a good ol nokia + gmaps). Funny, I would of thought it would have effected me personally a lot more, especially me being a software developer and all. But honestly it would make my life a lot easier, then cross-platform would be just linux :)

CM30 9y ago

As someone who doesn't particularly like social networking sites, and especially dislikes Facebook compared to other social networks... I'd drop Facebook first. Heck, I only joined because I had to in order to add a page for a business I was working with. Apple I could drop pretty easily too. An iPhone is nice, but it's not exactly the be all and end all. Any old Android phone could work well too. Amazon... personally I'd be able to drop it easily, though most people would have more trouble there. That's because nowadays the products I mostly buy from there are computer accessories and games, and the latter is under serious competition from the likes of Steam, various digital download stores on consoles and even the companies themselves selling boxed versions. Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance. Microsoft would be tough, simply because Microsoft Office is really important to me, and I'm really used to Windows at this point. Google is arguably the toughest one to drop. Why? Mix of services needed (it's damn hard to promote a website about certain subjects without YouTube nowadays, and Gmail is very convenient) and the fact their alternatives are just nowhere near as good for a search engine. Which is depressing given how far downhill Google's own search results have gone recently... But yeah, interesting to see the stats there.

Antrikshy 9y ago
> Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance. I sometimes buy groceries on those sites, but not all of it; only the things I don't need immediately but will soon (and if it doesn't have weirdly high pricing on it). I also usually use Prime Now and not Amazon.com.
gutnor 9y ago
> I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? As a foreigner, Amazon ( and others ) offers food that is simply not accessible in the local supermarket. All the food that requires a trip to a larger supermarket or a specific shop ? For example, my last buy was some sort of pasta that is difficult to find in London. I'm 100% certain I could find it in some Italian shop. I'm 80% certain at least 1 of the major supermarket stock at their largest store. To find out, I would need to explore the city. I don't want that pasta enough to dedicate a whole week-end to search for it. Alternatively, I can use internet and the first results are generally a shop that offers delivery. Again I don't want to dedicate a significant part of my we to go to that shop to buy 4 GBP worth of pasta.

BadassFractal 9y ago

I stopped using Facebook and Twitter for a few months. Once the initial pains of withdrawal subsided, I couldn't even remember that was something I wanted to check. Don't need either one of them.

nstart 9y ago

Fascinating to see that people choose to drop fb first in most cases. I'm wondering how many are considering WhatsApp as part of fb. In my case I could drop fb and Instagram tomorrow. WhatsApp? That'd be really really really hard to just drop out of touch with family or force them to install something else.

fooey 9y ago
The only things I use from Facebook are React and GraphQL. I don't care about any of their services, at all.
ghaff 9y ago
Lots of people, including myself, barely know what WhatsApp is.
what_ever 9y ago
Pretty easy to just switch to Telegram. There are tons of messaging apps that use phone number as identity. Signal, WeChat (I think?), Allo, Hike to name a few.
Jare 9y ago
WhatsApp is huge in Europe but any other IM app could replace it in a matter of weeks if necessary.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

closeparen 9y ago

I ranked in order of how easy it would be to get equivalent services elsewhere. Amazon is a particularly good ecommerce site, but by no means alone in its class, and there are plenty of IaaS providers. (Getting locked in to AWS specific products is a bad idea anyway). Microsoft products already have superior competitors on the marketplace. Retooling and retraining the entire business IT world will cost something, but it needs to happen anyway. People have been trying to replace Facebook since it started; some new entrant will supplant it overnight. No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I think it would take a long time for someone to replace its offerings with equivalently polished products, if it ever even happens (the demand for cheap stuff might be so strong that Apple is only viable because of brand inertia). I'd miss it. Alphabet is unmatched in search, drive, email, and Bell Labs-style R&D moonshots. I doubt it's repeatable outside of the specific time and place from which it emerged.

falcolas 9y ago
> No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I would dare say that Microsoft is encroaching on this slowly but surely. Between the Surface, Surface book, the upcoming niche desktop PC, and air-esque laptop, they are steadily coming up with compelling offerings that are eating into Apple's space. Google's Pixel devices are also squeezing Apple, though mostly in the mobile market.

flukus 9y ago

From the perspective of what the impact would be if these companies disappear: Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to. Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work. Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.

gremlinsinc 9y ago

My order was : 1. FB (because it doesn't serve any really important meaningful purpose... I much prefer reddit), 2. Apple: Because I hate apple products and their closed walled gardens when it comes to building apps and things (I'm android/linux desktop user). 3. MS: DOn't much use any of their products anymore, but did for a long time, and if I were to leave linux I'd probably go back to windows, since I like custom built computers. 4. Amazon: Love amazon, great deals - only place I shop, but if they didn't exist I'd probably find somewhere else using google. 5. Alphabet: Self-driving cars, android, youtube, gmail, search (I've tried bing, etc... but no other search provider gives the quality of results -- esp for coding questions), and they're even my isp: Google FIBER... so yeah this one would be a hard one to sever for me.

Antrikshy 9y ago
I feel like this is the exact order most people will drop them in.
ge96 9y ago
I kind of don't understand why people would drop these, who else would take over? I realize you don't want monopolies, want competition to bring out innovation. But at the same what else do you have left from the internet unless your life isn't already heavily integrated with these services. edit: I don't have an Apple product myself. Though the build quality is nice, it's expensive (and I am poor) also never used/could be confusing to use iOS/Mac OS. Use Gmail... but you can use hotmail (microsoft), Yahoo (yikes). Chrome browser (google) ... Youtube (google) ahh you can use Vimeo... Don't use Facebook (don't have friends) though their marketing/advertising for a business is great. Just my useless opinion
BigJono 9y ago
I'm interested how reddit of all things acts as a replacement for Facebook. What do you use for IMing, group chats, organising events and sharing jokes (memes?) between friends? I'd imagine those are the main use cases of FB for most people. Nobody I know cares in the slightest about the news feed, it's just private groups and messenger.

big_spammer 9y ago

I dropped all except Amazon, because books are cheaper there. The cockroach is Amazon. Google was surprisingly easy to drop. I use DuckDuckGo and quit GMail. Microsoft I dropped more than a decade ago. I never used Facebook. I half-dropped Apple by switching away from Mac OS X, but I still own in iPhone that I'll drop when it breaks.

thablackbull 9y ago

In order of what I could easily/already drop: Facebook: Never had Facebook Apple: Don't use any Apple products Alphabet (Google): 90%+ searches are now through DuckDuckGo for me Amazon: Needed as online shopping often through Amazon, and I still buy a lot of books through them Microsoft: Must have, my life is intimately tied to Excel

jcranmer 9y ago

For me, the hard choice was whether to drop Facebook or Apple first, and then whether to drop Microsoft or Google last. I don't really use either Facebook or Apple (or Amazon either, I guess, but Amazon ended up in the "no opinion" category more than anything else)--I've not looked at Facebook in months, and I've not posted anything in years, and the newest Apple product I own is well over a decade old. Ultimately, I'd drop Facebook first largely because I see Apple as still providing some value-add, whereas it's hard to see any value-add from Facebook. I ultimately dropped Microsoft last because they're the only ones who have made decent office productivity software (I say this having used both Corel's stuff long ago and LibreOffice for several years). For all of the visualization stuff that the NYT does, I'm surprised that the visualization here is pretty sucky. Only bar graphs of the top and bottom choices? Really? That's the most you could come up with?

blfr 9y ago

I have never really used Apple or Facebook much, dropped Microsoft years ago, loss of support for my Kindle would be at most a minor inconvenience but Google? Crippling. I use G Suite both privately and at work, basically run my life via Calendar/Maps/Keep, and get a nervous twitch in my left eye just at the thought of what a massive hassle it would be to first switch, and very likely second -- maintain the alternative. That's even before I consider that there would be no Google to turn to when configuring that alternative, that my phone would essentially become a Nokia E52 with a larger screen (no Google Apps, no Uber without Google Maps, not even the local bus/directions app would work, not sure about Signal), and I that would need to dig up a ton of data from a cold, cold storage. On a lighter note, NYT is now writing HN-tailored clickbait. We captured the zeitgeist.

tbabb 9y ago

- Facebook I think does more harm to the world on the whole (basically a chain-letter conveyor belt for a majority of the public), but slight good to me personally (able to keep in touch with people that would otherwise have disappeared from my life), so it was a toss-up of interpretation whether to dump it first or second. - Killing MSFT would do a lot of short-term economic damage, but the new innovation that happens to fill its place would probably be an easy net boon. Linux would be a fast replacement, and it would probably force that ecosystem to blossom. As someone who doesn't use any MSFT products (I have no need for them), I wouldn't personally suffer at all. - Amazon is the center of online commerce, but I think it's already a fat, complacent company. Their infrastructure is famously good, but the purchasing experience is crap. Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online experience, and the recommendations are laughably bad. What takes its place would necessarily be much better. - Apple's products are still a force of pressure on the market to innovate, though I suspect that will not be true for much longer. Their latest products are less clearly better than the competition, and they've made some bizarre design blunders. My next phone/laptop will likely not be Apple, so once their innovation dries up, seeing them disappear probably wouldn't make much of a difference in my life. - Google and Gmail are still unparalleled. One could imagine something better than Gmail, but Google search is so core and effortless it's hard to picture what an improvement would look like. Deleting google would break the internet.

Nition 9y ago
> Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online experience I can't believe that after all these years and all the engineers they must have, sorting a category by top rated still puts an item with one review and 5 stars above a product with 10,000 reviews and an average of 4.9 stars.
- premrajnarkhede 9y ago
  OMG! so true! I have been going with popularity as sorting parameter and screening low rated products myself

Yetanfou 9y ago

1: Facebook, no question there. I never had an account, nor do I ever plan on getting one. This is one company I'd like to be rid of, please. 2: Amazon, there's plenty of other options and - at least in Europe - I don't see any specific advantage to Amazon anyway. 3: Apple, overpriced lifestyle is not my style and I don't particularly like their attitude in many ways, nor do I like the idea of them having enough cash to buy a small country. It is not so much that I begrudge them their success but that I wonder what that power will eventually be used for. 4: Microsoft, using Linux since 1992, OS/2 before that, another company I won't miss having around. Having said that, as long as Apple is around I'd like to keep Microsoft alive as well, just like I wanted Apple to be there to make sure Microsoft did not gain a 100% stranglehold on mainstream personal computing. 5: Alphabet - or should I just say Google. I use some of their products in 'customised' form, Android without Google-proprietary stuff, the search engine without persistent cookies. I don't have a Google account though so I'm not tied to them by more than a search setting in a browser (Seamonkey, Firefox, Chromium, ...). There are other search engines, there are other mobile operating systems.

midnitewarrior 9y ago
Don't forget that Microsoft was a top Linux code contributor for awhile, and that OS/2 was a partnership between IBM and Microsoft. Microsoft is everywhere.

dmourati 9y ago

Microsoft and Facebook are the obvious easy ones for me. The next three are far more interesting as I use each on a daily basis.

ruytlm 9y ago

5. Microsoft. Could arguably live without Windows and Office (via either OSX or Linux), but at present it underpins all that I do on a computer. 4. Alphabet. Alphabet/Google products are the next layer I use on top of MS products, therefore are the next hardest to remove. 3. Facebook. The next layer again; MS and Alphabet provide general case tools, FB is a particular implementation on top of those, so it would go before either of the above two. 2. Amazon. No Amazon in Australia anyway, no big loss. 1. Apple. Only Apple product/service I use is a keyboard. Happy to see it go.

Spooky23 9y ago

The easiest to drop for me would be Facebook and Amazon. I enjoy Apple and Google. products and don't see a need to drop. Microsoft doesn't have a big impact on my personal life anymore. It wouldn't be feasible to remove them fro, my personal life, however.

JoshMnem 9y ago

> Could you ditch them? Yes, of course. All of them. I was alive before those companies existed, and life was more pleasant then in many ways. I already use Linux. Google Search is a difficult one to replace in this line of work. Google Maps is especially useful for people who tend to get lost, but I think it's also bad for people's brains, because it takes cognitive load off of the brain's navigation system, which is required for many cognitive tasks, including memory.* In any case, there would be other mapping companies to fill the space. * It still needs more research, but this is interesting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm

ionised 9y ago

I chose Facebook as my number 1 and Alphabet as my number 2. He then goes on to rant about how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is and how difficult my life must be not using Google services. The contrary is true. It's very easy not to use Google services and they are very replaceable.

falcolas 9y ago
> how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is > It's very easy not to use Google services Both can be true. Which is more true for you depends on how much of the ecosystem you (and your peers) use. For example, the previous startup I worked for used Google services quite extensively. Chat, hangouts, documents, spreadsheets, drive, email, calendar, even YouTube... the cost of moving off would have been quite significant, for very little benefit. The company before that didn't use Google at all, and instead used IRC, NFS/SMB servers, and private MX servers. They functioned fine, though many of the non-tech users were beginning to grumbling about the benefits of moving to Google (because that was what they were familiar with). There's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy which always comes up when talking about moving off Google, but that doesn't mean the cost of replacing everything Google provides is anywhere near zero - especially when it comes to convenience. In a way, Google's offerings have become the new Microsoft Office suite - used not because they're the best at any one thing, but because of all the value provided by everything together, and the familiarity of incoming users with that suite.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

First drop for me is easily Microsoft. I have a gaming PC, and I keep it booted in Ubuntu unless a game requires Windows. I'm pretty sure I could boot into Windows less often if I used WINE, but I don't currently wanna deal with that hassle. The only other tools from Microsoft that I follow are TypeScript and Visual Studio Code, but I'm happily using Flow and WebStorm. Second drop would definitely be Facebook. I feel like my Facebook feed is largely full of shitty memes. It'd be annoying to lose Messenger, but most of the contacts I regularly speak with are available through other means of communication. If I were closing my account I'd probably message a bunch of people to make sure I have their alternative contact info. I don't think I'd be able to easily drop React and Flow. Migrating away from their ecosystem would be incredibly challenging for me. I can't drop Amazon, Apple, or Google.