• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 hours ago

    Microsoft’s oligopoly (officially sanctioned and enabled by US society) has cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars if not more.

    It has cost everything the tech industry made since then and everything it could have made if MS and its helpers hadn’t killed most of the interesting companies, from DEC to Nokia. I’m not naming Sun, because honestly they are seen through rosy glasses by many today, they were the dotcom bubble locomotive and in general had that weird authoritarian vision of future tech which is similar to what we are getting, but without cool industrial design of Sun. They were not the corporation of good.

    Microsoft’s oligopoly is a device of fate for the world similar to what tech monopolies were for Japan, leading it into recession, or to China’s isolation policies that led to its 200 years old catastrophes. It’s not something that will be hidden by bigger events or undone. It has defined our world for many decades.

    Perhaps it will be named in the future as one of the main reasons for WWIII.

    That being said, I don’t think everyone at Microsoft or Google is evil, but a far larger percent of their employees are evil than one would think (i.e. it’s not only the senior executives).

    Not even evil, just spineless apes who shouldn’t have civil rights (it’s not a dog whistle, I mean independently of race, such people actually tend to be racist when they can get away with it).