The web as an app platform form was primarily pushed by Netscape to circumvent Microsoft’s monopoly. Sun tried the same with Java. Both of these efforts led dir

The web as an app platform form was primarily pushed by Netscape to circumvent Microsoft’s monopoly. Sun tried the same with Java. Both of these efforts led directly to every problem the author is complaining about. There was no utopia. The world went from an expensive monopoly under IBM to an expensive monopoly under WinTel to an expensive duopoly under Microsoft and Apple. If people dislike exploitative SaaS and content platforms, stop using them. No one is forcing anyone. Plenty of people use home servers and Linux. Go for it. There are also tools like Chris Titus’s UWU to make Windows more tolerable, and MS still sells an office suite that can be installed locally. You don’t even have to “sign in” with it, though you can. I’ve lived through several distinct eras of computing. This one may not be the most exciting, but it’s by far the best. You can use SaaS or locally installed stuff, and emulators (both hardware and software) exist to keep the older stuff alive. Even better, I don’t have to panic save every 5 seconds, reboot my computer every hour, and my computer can come with me. I don’t get disconnected when someone places a call, and while some software is expensive, it’s cheaper than it used to be when inflation adjusted. Go fire up an Apple II, an H89, a TRS-80, or a PET without any modern supplementation and tell me that those are preferable. You may groan about Google, but go back to purchasing tons of manuals that may or may not be specific to your machine, read through them only to find no answer and proceed to play detective for a few weeks. How much more productive is your time with a dang search engine?