3 ms·

People are going to get fed up with all these stupid, user-hostile tricks coming from the major tech companies. I'm not just talking about this one incident. Th

People are going to get fed up with all these stupid, user-hostile tricks coming from the major tech companies. I'm not just talking about this one incident. There's a bar that's not only lowering, but crashing fast. Ploys like these tend to be a symptom from companies about to become obsoleted by innovators who actually understand and give a shit about their target audience.

thrwaway69 7y ago
I have been hearing that for a decade. I remember the time when installing anything would change your browser's search engine. Those companies are still alive and going. What eventually hurt their market space wasn't some trendy hippie customer oriented startup but other "lesser evil" big companies with bigger pockets.
- close04 7y ago
  I think people are slowly getting used to all the tricks the major tech companies use and they are going to see this as more and more acceptable and even perfectly normal. And those companies know this. I'm sure they pay very qualified people to tell them how far and how fast they can take it to get what they want without truly alienating the people. The stuff that many people find perfectly acceptable today would have been absolutely outrageous 10-15 years ago.
- rkagerer 7y ago
  There's nothing hippie about capitalizing on the opportunity created when a market leader alienates its customers by letting its products rot with pain points. In some ways Google is just as sinister as Microsoft ever was. It's not any sort of intentional master plan, it's simply what happens when you lose sight of the user. Some of the crap being pulled by today's incumbents... They might as well put a little imp in the box that beats you with a whip to drive the behavior they want from you. All of them began as tiny startups with a couple of smart people and disruptive tech... take a long enough view and I'm still optimistic the cycle will continue.
  - lioeters 7y ago
    Yes! I believe "the people", in this case the users who are getting abused/exploited/disrespected, need to be more attentive and vocal about borderline illegal behavior of corporations, tech companies included. It's shame how Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al have behaved in recent years, patronizing and manipulating users on a mass scale with a brazenness and near impunity. (OK, Microsoft deserves some love with VS Code, TypeScript, and other open source goodness, but..) I'm with your optimistic comment that the pendulum is swinging back. These companies have lost sight of users, what "customer care" means, and they're leaving an increasing gap in the market for more humane service and technology.
janpot 7y ago
There are no people in this world through the eyes of these companies. They only see "consumers". Walking money-bags. And they'll do whatever they need to to shake as much out of them as they can. Nowhere is there a guarantee that what's best for the user is what generates the most money. It's a system failure.
pjc50 7y ago
> about to become obsoleted by innovators who actually understand and give a shit about their target audience. A caring innovator is very easily crushed by a platform monopolist. And building your own platform and securing mass adoption is incredibly hard. Microsoft didn't manage it in phones.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  A caring innovator is very easily crushed by a platform monopolist. That's been a common suggestion in tech for years, but I'm not sure it stands up to scrutiny. Right now, we do most of our graphics work with "young upstarts" like the Affinity suite, because Adobe went all user-hostile and subscription-based. Previously we'd been Creative Suite users. Every service used to collect payments by every business I have is from the newer generation, not the big banks or PayPals of the world. We didn't move to Windows 10 but instead we've been experimenting with various other desktop platforms and other devices according to our needs. Previously we were mostly using Windows 7 PCs. We don't do a lot of "traditional" office document preparation ourselves any more, and the various OSS packages are fine for the occasional spreadsheet or whatever. But among our professional network, there is a lot of use of online collaboration and documentation tools now, and I can hardly think of anyone we work with regularly who is still using MS Office as their main tool for this kind of work. Basically, at this point, we typically keep a single machine around with a genuine copy of whatever big name software we used to use, for guaranteed compatibility and/or testing purposes, but the 800lb gorillas of the software world have mostly been eliminated from our day-to-day workflows now. Smaller, more flexible businesses like ours certainly are moving away from the traditional monopolies, even if the huge enterprise deployments are slower to do so.
bakuninsbart 7y ago
I just switched to libre despite having 2 different office licenses, because I got way too annoyed with an issue. Basically, at first my excel died in a way that actually set back saves on some of my files. I was surprised this is even possible. Nothing worked to solve the problem except a reinstall, but you can't just reinstall Excel, you need to reinstall the whole package. I did that, but now there is no simple way anymore to have compartmentalized logins with different licenses on the same system. At least I didn't find one. I'm used to setup directories, servers etc. but this kind of bullshit is extremely off-putting to me.

thrwaway69 7y ago

I have been hearing that for a decade. I remember the time when installing anything would change your browser's search engine. Those companies are still alive and going. What eventually hurt their market space wasn't some trendy hippie customer oriented startup but other "lesser evil" big companies with bigger pockets.

close04 7y ago
I think people are slowly getting used to all the tricks the major tech companies use and they are going to see this as more and more acceptable and even perfectly normal. And those companies know this. I'm sure they pay very qualified people to tell them how far and how fast they can take it to get what they want without truly alienating the people. The stuff that many people find perfectly acceptable today would have been absolutely outrageous 10-15 years ago.
rkagerer 7y ago
There's nothing hippie about capitalizing on the opportunity created when a market leader alienates its customers by letting its products rot with pain points. In some ways Google is just as sinister as Microsoft ever was. It's not any sort of intentional master plan, it's simply what happens when you lose sight of the user. Some of the crap being pulled by today's incumbents... They might as well put a little imp in the box that beats you with a whip to drive the behavior they want from you. All of them began as tiny startups with a couple of smart people and disruptive tech... take a long enough view and I'm still optimistic the cycle will continue.
- lioeters 7y ago
  Yes! I believe "the people", in this case the users who are getting abused/exploited/disrespected, need to be more attentive and vocal about borderline illegal behavior of corporations, tech companies included. It's shame how Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al have behaved in recent years, patronizing and manipulating users on a mass scale with a brazenness and near impunity. (OK, Microsoft deserves some love with VS Code, TypeScript, and other open source goodness, but..) I'm with your optimistic comment that the pendulum is swinging back. These companies have lost sight of users, what "customer care" means, and they're leaving an increasing gap in the market for more humane service and technology.

janpot 7y ago

There are no people in this world through the eyes of these companies. They only see "consumers". Walking money-bags. And they'll do whatever they need to to shake as much out of them as they can. Nowhere is there a guarantee that what's best for the user is what generates the most money. It's a system failure.

pjc50 7y ago

> about to become obsoleted by innovators who actually understand and give a shit about their target audience. A caring innovator is very easily crushed by a platform monopolist. And building your own platform and securing mass adoption is incredibly hard. Microsoft didn't manage it in phones.

Silhouette 7y ago
A caring innovator is very easily crushed by a platform monopolist. That's been a common suggestion in tech for years, but I'm not sure it stands up to scrutiny. Right now, we do most of our graphics work with "young upstarts" like the Affinity suite, because Adobe went all user-hostile and subscription-based. Previously we'd been Creative Suite users. Every service used to collect payments by every business I have is from the newer generation, not the big banks or PayPals of the world. We didn't move to Windows 10 but instead we've been experimenting with various other desktop platforms and other devices according to our needs. Previously we were mostly using Windows 7 PCs. We don't do a lot of "traditional" office document preparation ourselves any more, and the various OSS packages are fine for the occasional spreadsheet or whatever. But among our professional network, there is a lot of use of online collaboration and documentation tools now, and I can hardly think of anyone we work with regularly who is still using MS Office as their main tool for this kind of work. Basically, at this point, we typically keep a single machine around with a genuine copy of whatever big name software we used to use, for guaranteed compatibility and/or testing purposes, but the 800lb gorillas of the software world have mostly been eliminated from our day-to-day workflows now. Smaller, more flexible businesses like ours certainly are moving away from the traditional monopolies, even if the huge enterprise deployments are slower to do so.

bakuninsbart 7y ago

I just switched to libre despite having 2 different office licenses, because I got way too annoyed with an issue. Basically, at first my excel died in a way that actually set back saves on some of my files. I was surprised this is even possible. Nothing worked to solve the problem except a reinstall, but you can't just reinstall Excel, you need to reinstall the whole package. I did that, but now there is no simple way anymore to have compartmentalized logins with different licenses on the same system. At least I didn't find one. I'm used to setup directories, servers etc. but this kind of bullshit is extremely off-putting to me.