In apple's case, they have a fairly small but dedicated marketshare that cares deeply about those issue. That's why I trust them to not sabotage their product. Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to care.

Microsoft: the OEM is the customer.

Google: advertisers are the customer and you are the product.

Linux: its own developers are the customers.

How so anymore? There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to. Microsoft even now has Linux offerings its a new era.

For a lot of people there isn't.

Take my dad for example. He sells weight scales for retail (think butchers, greengrocers, cheese shops, etc). Those scales are pretty much embedded PC's nowadays, they connect to the internet and can be remotely accessed to update product prices, promotions, get the daily sales numbers but also things like changing the logos and text on the receipt and a million other things.

The manufacturers of those scales sell a piece of software to do that, but it's always a 100% Windows app, held together with all kinds of (outdated) MS technology like Visual FoxPro. Often they have licenses that require hardware dongles, have bizarre drivers to communicate with the hardware and it feels like it's al held together with spit and ducktape.

There is no Linux or OSS alternative, the protocols aren't even published and no one cares to reverse engineer them as the market is just tiny, and the target audience has no overlap with the techies that are interested in Linux and the like.

And that's just one example, there are tons of crappy, outdated, proprietary apps like that out there. Apps with tiny user bases no one cares about so no OSS options will ever emerge.

It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.

Which translates into a pretty large part of the small business market that doesn't have any de facto choice.

And WINE et al. aren't a scalable solution because invariably these things depend on odd Windows quirks and/or are generally terrible from a code/standards quality perspective. And there's functionally no way to address that because the historical-Windows-in-fact API is "every odd behavior every release of Windows has had over the years."

If they made a Linux version of Office and ported Direct3D to Linux, I'd be impressed. As such it's just embrace, extend extinguish again.

There are plenty of alternatives still. I only use Outlook due to work but I could also get around that through several ways.

Maybe we just have a different definition of monopoly?

Definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly

1 :exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

2 :exclusive possession or control

    no country has a monopoly on morality or truth —Helen M. Lynd 

    had a monopoly on flint from their quarries —Barbara A. Leitch 

    The government passed laws intended to break up monopolies.

Also Office 2003 and LibreOffice4/5 have way more in common than Office 2003 has with 2010/2013/2016.

None of this really matters - if you tell someone word ate a word document then they are sympathetic whereas if you tell them libreoffice ate a word document the reaction is much less favourable. I do not like this.

My solution - I just refuse to use any office software.

That said, a VM works wonders and people aren’t as confused by them as I would have expected!

Not sure what to do about pptx.

What can it not do that office can do?

Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.

That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr...

One error cost $6 Billion in the "London Whale"

Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.

It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors.

Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.

I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.

COM and VBA scripting? Access database sourcing?

Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors).

It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.

[1] https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Using-structured-re...

PowerPivot. Database Access (JDBC to a handful of DBs isn't anywhere close to what Excel offers.)

I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.

PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features.

> As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets.

Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.

> You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.

You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.

The distinction isn't artificial: you can build upon excel as if it's a programming platform, but that doesn't make excel itself more powerful - all you've done is built yourself into a proprietary tech stack. With enough time you could do the same thing in Google sheets with Google's proprietary scripting interface. Comparing the two apps at baseline there is no difference in sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a plugin.

> You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.

Yeah, actually it does - you just won't be solving everything with an xls file and you might actually be using a more appropriate tool for the problem, but I guarantee Google has an equivalent offering.

Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.

For something brand new I would imagine Google Sheets can handle the vast majority of use cases.

1. user defined style definitions

2. citations / bibliography

3. anchoring

There are plugins that can help, but at least where I work using these is often banned to avoid the risk of leaking corp info.

Desktop/Laptops is now a 3-way split between MS, Apple and Google with chromebooks.

Mobile is a split between Apple and Google with MS out of it.

Cloud is Amazon out in front with MS in second place.

Office is the one area where MS could be considered to have a monopoly but even there I think cloud players are gaining ground and also (AFAIK) there's no advertising in paid for versions of MS Office.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

I guess the perception of whether or not Microsoft effectively has a monopoly in the gaming PC market segment really centers around the games you play.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. :)

Fortunately there's been a lot of great games coming out for Linux too recently, mostly thanks to cross-system frameworks like Unity, I assume. And that's great, but not really enough to threaten Windows' position in the PC game market.

Android dominates mobile OS usage, but iOS has equal profits if not greater than Android

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...

In the US maybe (and I doubt even there).

In the rest of the world it's 90% windows machines.

In certain markets like schools, windows is down to 22% in the US and 65% Worldwide (https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/02/apple-ios-market-share-k-12-e...)

These don't really feel like monopoly numbers like we used to see around the 1995-2005 timeframe when Microsoft were at their most monopolistic.

I won't be surprised if this gets challenged for anti-trust.

Using daily, only thing I've seen - notification about Edge (which came with the OS). what?

If you don't see them, you've likely disabled them.

Easy to turn off the live tiles and the suggested apps, and you can very quickly type to find any app so many people probably don't even look at the programs menu.

Heck, on iOS not only am I forced to look at apps that I don't want, I am also forced to use them! On the Macintosh OS, whenever I want to see what updates are available, I have to first look at the featured apps in their store. Even Ubuntu installs a shit-load of crappy programs that I don't want.

At least in Windows, you can disable them and pretty much never see them again. I've been on Windows 10 for years now and I think that I saw a Candy Crush launcher tile appear once and then it was gone forever.

Every OS has this ? I mean, this is literally windows putting ads on the equivalent of the IOS launcher. No OS does that !

I don't really care about the built-in crapware (well, I do, but let's save this for another debate). That the OS actively fights for the user's attention is ridiculous. I don't really mind "ads" for their built-in products. The Edge popup[0] was almost cute, the OneDrive explorer ad[1] was understandable. But this[2] or this[3] ? That's just corporate greed at its finest. Sorry.

[0] https://i.stack.imgur.com/l6JLb.jpg

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/File-...

[2] https://www.digitalcitizen.life/sites/default/files/gdrive/w...

[3] http://securitydaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/windows1...

Apple gives you no choice to even replace certain apps that they desperately want to force onto users!

And what does that have to do with ads?

I would be willing to send MS that information, but only as an opt-in.

Anyway, how many UWP apps are you running? Do you think every Win32 desktop app is now magically tracking you? Nope.

So, let's compare how many UWP apps that you actually want to run (I don't use any of them) and see if they're tracking you as much as all the mobile apps you're running. There's no contest here.

You are able to turn it down to "Basic" using the GUI, and if you are using the enterprise edition thru corporate volume licensing you can turn it down further to "Security" with admin tools.

There is no way to turn it off completely, and since its cranked up by default, that is where it will stay for the majority of installations.

As an anecdote, even Microsoft employees I've spoken with think it's overreaching and underhanded.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/confi...

edit : clarification on corporate option

Even if you don't want to do any of those for some reason, reading about the Basic level of telemetry - it's nothing. At least it's nothing that I care about.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/try

[1] https://winaero.com/blog/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data-c...

[2] http://www.thewindowsclub.com/tools-tweak-privacy-settings-w...

The registry edit is specifically not honored for non-enteprise SKUs.

Bringing this back to the the story, one is assigned to a Mac Pro, where, per Microsoft’s bizarre licensing terms, it qualifies as an “upgrade” to the bundled copy of OS X (upon which I run it under VMware, permissible via further licensing gyrations).

Another option was Action Pack, where I would get 10 licenses for a very nice price, with a bunch of other products, but that would be only usable for development or testing, not for production (i.e. not for daily use while running the company).

Yes it is. I have multiple copies of it available to me with my MSDN subscription which only costs me about $800 per year.

Are you starting an app or search for document, using the windows shell? Your phrase goes to Bing. That's much harder to avoid than just not using an app.

So, the only tracking you're left with is the kind that comes packaged in UWP apps.

So much for "disabling".

So now I'm on Sierra, and I absolutely hate it. I thought it'd mostly just be uglier, but it bugs me with updates I don't want or need but am not allowed to ignore. And I hate their in-your-face notifications blocking an important part of my screen. (How about at the bottom next to the dock? Or in the menu bar? Just not over an active working window.)

(It's my least favourite notification too.)

"Umm, hey there...me again. You still haven't tried Safari? What's wrong? Want me to launch it for you?"

"Ok, this is getting a little awkward. We worked pretty hard making Safari, and you won't even try it? I'm trying to not be insulted here, but you're not making it easy."

"Listen motherfucker. You know that Keychain thing that you don't really pay much attention to. Well, I control that. If you want to see your Gmail password again, try motherfucking Safari. Clicky clicky, you lazy fuck."

And the "please use iCloud..."

On cars we used to call them "guilt buttons" for plastic shaped like buttons on the dashboard for options you didn't purchase.

I've found a way to get rid of the update notifications, though: click "details", which opens the app store with a list of your pending updates. As long as you leave that open, the notification won't reappear.

Still annoying, though.

Alternately, you can totally disable notification center via the terminal: http://osxdaily.com/2012/08/06/disable-notification-center-r...

I don't think there's a way to move them, unfortunately. Or to disable just the update notifications, beyond just disabling auto-download for them.

I also never get notifications about updates. No workarounds needed.

According to, which references an official looking SEC form: https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-Googles-revenue-comes-...

"86.5% of Alphabet’s revenue still comes from their advertising business, which is driven by searches in web browsers"

That's a hell of a lot.

I wonder how quickly their other revenue sources are growing? A ton of companies are using Google products in a paid capacity. They're really very good.

Check "other revenue" from the filing.

Maybe they also look through your Google photos to find faces with beards... or check your email for references to beards or amazon orders with razors... and to show extra ads to people who live in the Portland area

Some people are more okay with the facts (top paragraph) and the possibly exaggerated version (previous paragraph) and others.

The misleading part is saying that that personalization is done by selling your data to advertisers.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/14/8606925/candy-crush-saga-...

[2]https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-window...

You can.

Gapps for business. $5 a month. No scanning of your email, etc.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.ht...

Sure, but the vast majority of users do not want to pay for the vast majority of internet content.

Microsoft pretty clearly wants 100% telemetry about everything you do on your computer - to the point where they will explicitly override user settings to the contrary - so you are underestimating the scope of their motivation