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 scrutin

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.