A customer is an external stakeholder. They do have a voice, but at a large scale / low % of revenue, it may be not be very loud.

If no one enjoyed the shade of a tree, it wouldn’t cease to exist. If customers stopped paying a business, they likely would.

>A customer is an external stakeholder.

Customers used to have more choice, this made them highly valued stakeholders.

Before the era of permanent rolling mandatory updates and new releases customers (And IT managers) had to be convinced a new version had more value than the software it was replacing.

Windows Vista, DOS 4 And numerous other software failed to get traction because the value of new features was too low vs the pain points.

Now days the focus is on shareholder value not customer needs.

Locking in customers and maximising revenue is far more important than marking software better for the end user or IT teams.

We are stakeholders in our role as citizens of democratic governments.

If holding a giant private corporation accountable is the battle you want to take before the government, aside from all the other problems society faces, go for it.

I’d never be caught dead complaining about how I “got screwed over” by entering an arrangement I knew about up front.

I would complain about government deciding the way the world worked decades before I was born as if that’s how it must work forever.

You emit whatever syntax your limbic system pushes your cortex to supply motor agency to, what’s useful inside your little bubble.

I’ll argue in mine. Aside from time/place of our body, it’s all we can do anyway.

EU might solve this for you, I remember how it was years back, with mobile phone providers, there was no monopoly just a few companies that split the market and hold the users captive. So EU does not care that Apple and Google are not monopolies or that a large potion of citizens are busy watching football, if there are enough people complaining they will investigate and if you see what happen in the past force interoperability and true choice.

Sure…

So, how many different word processors and spreadsheet providers does the EU bureaucracy itself use?

I don't know, do you know and what is this relevant? They get complaints and they look at them, apply the laws for the benefit of the citizens and not for companies, like when the mobile phone companies were regulated lot of people complained that this big companies will lose too much money but still I see Vodafone and the rest thriving and us the consumer can move to other companies without any pain.

Of course its relevant: you said the EU intervenes when people complain to stop corporate dominance and abuse.

Lots of people complained. The EU did nothing. Truly - Microsoft office is as dominant as it ever was. It the EU has an anti-monopoly/dominance purpose, if MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint isn't its white whale, its hard to imagine what would be.

And the GDPR is being similarly defanged.

But are you ignoring other laws from EU or country specific that worked ? If you do not know let me give you some example "web browser" the reason you are not commenting this from IE is because of law makers that stopped Microsoft abuse, the reason Intel is not a monopoly and charge you 2 times more for 10 times less is because lawmakers prevented it.

For GDPR you need to wait before you conclude, it is similar to laws that force companies to label the food and drinks, now the websites are labeled if they contained shit and how many tons of shit contain but some people instead of complaining that there is too much shit in the website they complain that the labels are too big and would prefer a cool shiny logo instead of informative text.

>"web browser" the reason you are not commenting this from IE is because of law makers that stopped Microsoft abuse, the reason Intel is not a monopoly and charge you 2 times more for 10 times less is because lawmakers prevented it.

Did you even try to be honest? In no way Microsoft did ever prevent competitor browsers from being installed. Nobody forced, forces or will force you to use IE, no matter the EU. It was typical EU bureaucratic socialist bs, doing the thinking for the user and of course in the end just sucking rich American tit by fining because they create nothing and just want to run those who do. Just like Soviet Union.

Also, I don't need "Mother EUSSR" telling me who collects data/uses cookies and ruining overall browsing experience. It's funny how their efforts are actually counter productive, because it's near impossible to browse the net in private mode (the one thing that ACTUALLY prevents data collection, not the useless cookie agreement pop-ups).

Dude MS and Intel got in trouble with US too. What MS did with IE is the same anti competitive thing they are doing now and what Google does, they offer free stuff runining smaller competitors, they can offer free stuff because they use their dominance in one market to force their products on other market.

So if I want to make a good video hosting platform I need to compete with Google, but Google is using their search dominance to offer YT for free so I can't compete fair with them. Same if I want to make an IDE or web browser, I am forced to compete with Chrome and Visual Studio Code, free stuff paid with money from other markets, so when all competition is killed you get the IE case where shit stagnates because there is no competition.