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Hmm.. this is the line where it become elitism? Google enables people to be productive and thousands of businesses to function. What's the difference between us

Hmm.. this is the line where it become elitism? Google enables people to be productive and thousands of businesses to function. What's the difference between using Google and a PC in the 90s? That you own the hardware? The hardware is useless to most people without the software. OK, so it's the data. Well, Microsoft were (and are) champions of vendor lock in. Even when they claimed to use open standards they messed it up (see the Office XML formats). If anything, Microsoft conditioned people to believing that personal computing was just running the software in your own house. It doesn't mean you are meaningfully in control of it, though. For me, it's only a short jump from there to what we see today where people just do the computing on someone else's computer too.

imiric 2y ago
> What's the difference between using Google and a PC in the 90s? Well, you answered that yourself. Software in the 90s was running locally, and the data it used was also local. That's an important difference from running software on someone else's computer with data you don't control. That access can be cutoff at any point, and there's nothing you can do about it. With local software and data you would at least have the option to export the data to another format (assuming the software supports it), or to read the data with another software. For the specific case of MS Office formats, even the closed ones prior to the XML formats were readable by 3rd party software. I would qualify this as being in "control of their computing". Vendor lock-in doesn't deprive users of this control. You have exactly the same issue with F/LOSS today. Whether you choose to use PostgreSQL/MySQL or Oracle/Access, you're always locked in to that specific vendor. Hopefully that vendor has good integrations and interoperability features so that you can migrate to something else if you wanted to, but the actual license has no bearing on this. I suppose our disagreement is with what it means to be in "control of computing". If you define it as being able to read, modify and share the source code, then proprietary software doesn't fit that definition. But most users don't practically need this level of control. As long as the software has decent interoperability, and you actually have control over how and where you run it, then proprietary software can qualify. SaaS, OTOH, does not.
CRConrad 2y ago
> Even when they claimed to use open standards they messed it up (see the Office XML formats). Yeah, sure -- but that came long after the 1980s / early '90s, which was the period at issue here.

imiric 2y ago

> What's the difference between using Google and a PC in the 90s? Well, you answered that yourself. Software in the 90s was running locally, and the data it used was also local. That's an important difference from running software on someone else's computer with data you don't control. That access can be cutoff at any point, and there's nothing you can do about it. With local software and data you would at least have the option to export the data to another format (assuming the software supports it), or to read the data with another software. For the specific case of MS Office formats, even the closed ones prior to the XML formats were readable by 3rd party software. I would qualify this as being in "control of their computing". Vendor lock-in doesn't deprive users of this control. You have exactly the same issue with F/LOSS today. Whether you choose to use PostgreSQL/MySQL or Oracle/Access, you're always locked in to that specific vendor. Hopefully that vendor has good integrations and interoperability features so that you can migrate to something else if you wanted to, but the actual license has no bearing on this. I suppose our disagreement is with what it means to be in "control of computing". If you define it as being able to read, modify and share the source code, then proprietary software doesn't fit that definition. But most users don't practically need this level of control. As long as the software has decent interoperability, and you actually have control over how and where you run it, then proprietary software can qualify. SaaS, OTOH, does not.

CRConrad 2y ago

> Even when they claimed to use open standards they messed it up (see the Office XML formats). Yeah, sure -- but that came long after the 1980s / early '90s, which was the period at issue here.