Shareholders can sue if they do not think their interests are being properly represented/manifested. They can also arbitrarily shuffle senior management as they see fit
> Shareholders can sue if they do not think their interests are being properly represented/manifested.
In general, shareholder recourse is limited to electing a new board that will do what those shareholders want. The exceptions are cases where the actions of the corporation or board are discriminatory to some shareholders, or where there is fraud or self-dealing by insiders (e.g., shareholder derivative suits).
> They can also arbitrarily shuffle senior management as they see fit
Not directly. Shareholders elect the board, which then chooses the managers (CEO, etc.) who actually run the company. Shareholders usually only elect board members once per year at the annual meeting. So it’s not arbitrary.
> Neither customers nor employees can do that
This is true. Customers and employees don’t direct the corporation the same ways that the owners (shareholders) do. However, customers can boycott and employees can strike. Those can be effective ways to influence the direction of a corporation. Also, customers can sue for other things (e.g., fraud or malpractice), as can employees (e.g., employment discrimination). And any injured third party can sue the corporation.
No you got it the wrong way around. The power is in the hands of the user.
> That will never happen as long as shareholders are the only people that companies are legally beholden to
The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them.
> That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users
The user can simply stop using the software if the developer doesn't respect their time (happiness is a completely subjective property dependant on the individual).
So I say this will never happen while people won't actively move for alternatives and put up with crappy products.
I made the effort to stop using products from large companies that don't respect my privacy and don't respect freedom of speech of their users. So whenever possible I don't use any products from the large tech companies.
If people can't be bothered and choose to be ignorant, they deserve what they get.
That only works if the user of the software has freedom of choice over the software they use.
For the majority of commercial software sales that is not the case.
Commercial software is overwhelmingly brought by companies who dictate to their staff what software they must work with.
And the companies which shell out the big bucks to keep terrible software products shambling along for year after year don't really do it because they hate they staff and want to screw up their happiness and productivity, although it can often seem like that. They do it because either there isn't anything else which does the thing they need to keep doing their business, or becuse they have so much past history and experience of using that product that it would be ridiculously expensive and dangerous to change or because they believe that the pain of supporting fifty different users using thirty different incompatible pieces of software to do the same job is worse than the pain of having all those users screwed up at the same time by an upgrade that goes bad.
None of which are unreasonable positions to take and all of which push the responsibility for improving the situtaion back to where it belongs: the writers and suppliers of the upgrade. Upgrades should adopt a hippocratic principle: the change that YOU make to the system which I have paid for and which I rely on to do my job should not suddenly impossible costs or make it impossible me to use it to do something that I was doing yesterday.
And that, in turn, is not going to happen, unless and until customers (both commercial and private) have the right to compensation for lost time and earning imposed by changes which benefit nobody except the software vendor.
The article is talking about forced updates by vendors of consumer grade software. That is what we are talking about.
Also the same rule still applies. If I had to use some terrible software everyday I would leave a job if it was that bad. I had to develop on a terrible CMS, once I realised it was never going to change, I looked for another job.
Governments are supposed to intervene in markets to keep them stable, functional and ethical. Hand-balling all market regulation to ethical individual consumption isn't workable for many industries where companies can monopolize, capture regulation and sway public opinion with advertising campaigns.
Unfortunately I should have expected a reply such as this. Everything is seen as a all or nothing proposition.
I think it is pretty obvious that if companies are abusing their position to that extent an appropriate governing body should step in. However there are going to be issues that won't fall under such a remit.
Also just because the government/regulator is failing to step in, doesn't mean you can't be doing something yourself. I was getting very frustrated with Google and its products. So I decided to stop using them whenever possible.
As for moving away from industry giants, this works. Firefox (back in the early 2000s) chipped away at IE's monopoly and broke the stagnation.
> The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them.
Yeah, much like how I get a choice to not use Jira at work, or to not use Facebook Messenger or not use LinkedIn right? The argument that everything ultimately comes down to individual user choice ignore so many externalities that it’s borderline unrealistic.
No, you don't need them, but have fun filling in those blanks on your own time for 10x-100x the effort. Hope none of those missed connections are important, and I hope nobody gives you a pregnant pause after you insist, "no, I don't use Linkedin" at your next networking event.
That’s just it. I don’t have to “find work”. Work finds me. I would have never found my latest job - working for BigTech in the comfort of my own home on the East Coast - if a recruiter hadn’t contacted me out of the blue. Every job I have gotten since 2012 (5) has been through a contact who found me through LinkedIn. Why would I reduce the ways someone contacts me?
Because for some is us the signal to noise ratio was too low (did I get that the right way around?).
For me LinkedIn for me was a total waste of time. Good you find it useful use it, but I don’t and I don’t like the company so I am deleted my account.
Also most of the contacts weren’t other devs or dev companies but recruiters. A lot of those recruiters flooded the feed with bullshit recruitment feel good articles and other trite. That combined with all the estalking and slimes dudes on there it just isn’t somewhere that is worth being around.
It’s just like the general rule of the Internet - Don’t read the comments. The purpose of LinkedIn for me is a Rolodex of former coworkers and a curated list of local recruiters. I have a separate email for LinkedIn. I would go through it once a week to see if there was anything interesting.
I literally setup almost everything I personally need in about a day on a VPS. As for services like LinkedIn I almost never got anything of value from it, it is worse than most job board it is filled with slimey recruiters these days and not a lot else.
I bought a NAS for backups with freenas and moving my email to a domain with a provider literally took me a few minutes (plugging DNS entries into my domain provider). It not that hard.
People should be making tools for helping people move away from platforms. I am personally going to write it all up and identify pain points.
I get plenty of business through (gasp) word of mouth and ex-colleagues. So I am fine.
How someone get off GMail if they have already been using it for a decade or quite a few years more than that? Has anyone done this? How do you do that with the fewest issues possible?
Having the most important communications with other people and companies, and the login verification all in the hands of one company which could shaft your access in all sorts of ways (screw up, removing service, ban) is just terrible in the long term. And if someone is using their ISPs email address, that is something that would keep them signed to that ISP even though another may offer a service much better for them.
Anyway, anyone migrated away from their email provider after a long time signed up and could answer some of the questions in the first paragraph? Thanks.
> How do you do that with the fewest issues possible?
You just create another email and register all your new accounts with it. Whenever you get any old notifications to your old email you recofigure them to your new email account, one by one. After about a year you will be practically free. You do not have to delete your Gmail account, you can just forward all its emails.
I've personally never used facebook actively and deleted my account soon after I made it. LinkedIn I have an account but I honestly never find a use for it even though I wouldn't be super against it.
A lack of both of these would not inconvenience me in any way personally and I find the claim that going without them being a lot of work questionable. Maybe I've just been lucky in who I work for/with?
I have a social life without Facebook yes, but I have a huge chunk of friends who use it to communicate and organise things. Another example: I go mountain biking - local clubs use fb pages and groups almost exclusively to inform people about trail closures, updates, events, etc.
I used to drink regularly down the pub. After a while I got sick of putting on weight and feeling rubbish and decided to give it up. The people I drank with after a few weeks stopped calling me (because I wasn't interested in going for a drink) and I haven't spoke to them in years. They wasn't such great friends were they?
If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.
You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need. I just decided I wasn't going to use them anymore and stop making excuses for having to deal with companies that couldn't give a fuck about me.
Sounds like acquaintances. You ought to have a bunch of those, they are great to have, very valuable, and lots of fun. All of my close friendships started out as acquaintances. I got my current appartment via an acquaintance – quite nice and below market price. My current job, my partner of many years, lots of great ideas and input, lots of useful advice ... having acquaintances is great. They won't follow you to the end of the world though – they're not that invested in you, by definition, that's why you can have many of them.
> If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.
If you insist everyone accomodate your communication preferences, but will not accomodate their communication preferences at all, maybe you weren't worth bothering with in the first place. If you trade them for a little bit of moral high ground that easily, that's not exactly great friendship either. If it's just Facebook, but Telegram is fine – I personally could work with that. Some people with old phones can't have all the messengers – might be a problem for them. No Whatsapp? Party planning just got a lot more annoying, because someone will have to play relay for you. Just taking phone calls, nothing else? The 20th century is long past and I'm glad for it, just get some kind of messenger like literally everyone else, even my parents. We still frequently escalate to phone calls, because it's easier for them – but we try to meet each other midway.
> You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need.
Or maybe there are legitimate needs that these apps and platforms fulfill, like making connecting with people and all sorts of communication really, really easy and frictionless, and for them that's worth the – so far – largely theoretical price we all pay; that's my personal stance in this. Maybe the benefits of a one-person-boycott aren't that compelling – it's not going to make a difference at all, unless everyone does so, but they don't, an when they do, they'll all flock to LibreOpenFree Network, so you won't even have to give up your contacts. A one-person boycott isn't going to keep Facebook from assembling a detailed shadow profile on you, unless you go to really great lengths that very, very few people are capable of, and then they still learn what your contacts leak about you.
If you're fine without social media, you got your social circle that agrees with you and sticks to phone calls, or maybe you're fine without lots of people in your life – great for you, you do you. But telling others who are not in that situation in what I read as quite a condescending tone that their social needs are just excuses, odd things they claim they need, that feels rude and not helpful at all.
No. They were drunks (I was becoming one myself). I told you in the sentence before that once I didn't come to the pub they weren't interested in spending any time with me. That what addicts are like.
This really isn't difficult stuff to understand. The acquaintance relationship only existed because of substance abuse basically. There is no friendship of shared interest outside of that.
I was thinking about writing a rebuttal to everything else you said. But there really isn't much point because you can't even understand this part of social interaction.
All my real friends btw, keep in touch via email, text etc. As for me demanding I use a communication medium, everyone has a cell phone with SMS and everyone has an email address. If people can't be bothered to do that ...
> If people can't be bothered and choose to be ignorant, they deserve what they get.
The problem is that those that do care also have to suffer. After a certain point of critical mass, when it comes to tech, oftentimes you can't just take your business elsewhere any more.
This is incorrect. You can almost always take your business elsewhere. It depends whether you think it is worth it, depending on how hard it makes the rest of your life.
If people really cared (as much as they claim) you will make alternatives work for you.
If you've a following on instagram and you decide to leave for whatever reason, you can't take your followers with you. Maybe some will jump over if you link them to other platforms
If you've an iOS app and you've run afoul of the app store, you can't take those iOS users with you without asking them to switch to another platform or asking them to use a web app instead (both of which are forbidden, I think)
If you're on gmail and your account gets suspended, you can't set up a magical redirect that sends all your mail to another address. Can you even use Google Takeout?
These are all extremely popular platforms with strong lock-in effects through various circumstances.
In too many cases, the switching costs are so high as to be destructive. Yes you can technically switch but the price is dire. That doesn't count in my book.
People, who still insist on developing programs for Apple out of greed are in collusion with Apple to strengthen their monopoly and should serve proportional share of Apple's sentence if it's ever to be judged for its anticompetitive business. They can't possibly be ignorant about it today.
> If you've a following on instagram and you decide to leave for whatever reason, you can't take your followers with you. Maybe some will jump over if you link them to other platforms
You should diversify your social media presence then and let your followers know "look if I am not here one day this is my website or you can find me here".
> If you've an iOS app and you've run afoul of the app store, you can't take those iOS users with you without asking them to switch to another platform or asking them to use a web app instead (both of which are forbidden, I think)
This is probably the only valid scenario presented due to there being only two players realistically in the mobile phone space.
> If you're on gmail and your account gets suspended, you can't set up a magical redirect that sends all your mail to another address. Can you even use Google Takeout?
This actually happened to a friend of mine (he got locked out of his account). He ended up learning from the experience and owns his own domain and uses one of the other email providers.
The government might fix these issues in another 10 years ... maybe? You are actually validating my point about people being ignorant of the risks of using services that can suspend you account for any reason at any time. Don't use them, or if you must then mitigate any potential fallout from losing access to that service.
People that have been being censored by large tech companies have already started doing this.
> In too many cases, the switching costs are so high as to be destructive. Yes you can technically switch but the
price is dire. That doesn't count in my book.
As we are arbitrarily deciding what counts, I don't think the social media accounts or the gmail issue is a big deal.
They are easily mitigated against as long as you aren't ignorant. Being a smart consumer, smart user will protect you much better than anything else. Which proves my point.
> You are actually validating my point about people being ignorant of the risks of using services that can suspend you account for any reason at any time. Don't use them, or if you must then mitigate any potential fallout from losing access to that service.
I love to trot out the "don't be stupid" argument too, and it never works. If "don't be stupid" was at all an effective mantra, tech would look a whole lot different. But people being stupid is what sustains these practices, and it is what provides the lock-in effect that I'm describing. Plus, someone will argue that it discriminates against unintelligent or mentally handicapped folks (which it does), or underprivileged folks and minorities (which is debatable). And then someone else will argue that people should be able to drive their car without having to know how to repair them (that's what services are for!) or that their specific choice in make/model/whatever shouldn't have a future tragic effect on their life. And those arguments are supported by law and government agencies backing them up.
Making excuses for ignorance is simply promoting learned helplessness.
Yes I appreciate there are edge cases such as the mentally handicapped. However realistic I am talking about the majority of the population which are capable of looking after themselves.
Again this much like another reply I received. You are making it an all or nothing scenario.
Realistically it will be a combination of regulation and people starting to get wise to what these companies are doing. At the moment the regulators don’t have the power or aren’t up to speed. So instead of waiting for the shit to hit the fan you can protect yourself and start mitigating risk.
I really don’t like this attitude of people that you cannot try to protect yourself.
When it comes to technology the majority of the population is not capable of looking after themselves. And it won't be this way for a very, very long time.
You don't represent stupid people, you make money on them taking advantage of the monopoly, you don't care about their interests. And they aren't as dysfunctional as you want to make them look like, they don't need to figure out everything by themselves, they can understand what they hear.
Well, nice to know that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Both you and tomc1985 are correct - it is this weird human thing where most people will continue to do things knowing full well of the consequences. For example we know of N things that cause pollution and global warming, we continue using them anyway.
Maybe there will be a day when the majority of the population will be more conscious of their lifestyle choices (and that technology choices deserve time and effort just like your dietary choices).
what about adobe though? what if you work in a field where you are forced to use a certain proprietary file format or software? this sounds a bit naiive. go talk to real johnnys :-)
> The last time I checked there was many competitors to Adobe in almost all the products they offered. You aren't forced to use their software at all.
Dude, if you're a professional graphic designer, you're using an Adobe workflow. The amount of friction that you would encounter in your daily work for any other choice is simply too high.
In other words, Adobe products are providing high enough value that people don't find it feasible to move away from it. If it is pure network effect, we should be seeing a regular but increasing decline in their market share.
in other words: adobe has a monopoly. they can extract and do whatever they want to their users and nobody can do anything about it. same with apple. same with google. same with many other sv robber barons.
That's only part of it. There are plenty of Photoshop users who would prefer to switch but can't because of project constraints, or because it is a required format for some future step in the chain, or whatever. When you need no-hassle first-class support for PSD, or PDF, or that InDesign project that Mary from marketing sent you... who else can you turn to but Adobe?
That will never happen as long as software continues to be regarded as a "cost center"
That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users
That will never happen as long as evangelists keep pushing this doctrine that more updates, more features, more whatever, is better