this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
17 points (54.7% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3403 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
any discussion about shit that bill or steve or the alphabet wankers do is a bigger waste of resources than AI art.
I'd like to politely disagree
Finding alternatives to large software packages is great, don't think I'm not saying that - but any time you have competitor X and competitor Y, be they both commercial, both F/OSS, or some combination thereof, the competitors must be cognizant of each other when setting up features.
Burying your head in the sand and ignoring Microsoft, Apple, and Google is a very solidly Microsoft-Apple-Google-style play. It's the play of someone who believes the other side offers no competition. That's how you get unwieldy features these tech giants implement because they know they can make a 70% effort and people won't be annoyed enough to leave.
Every tool they make has a reason someone made it. Many tools are very important - for one example, the Microsoft Office document format is considered to be almost a universal format in presentations, spreadsheets, and plain documents for message passing between businesses.
But as we as a society design alternatives to those various monopolies (as we should), we need users to want to use the new thing. We have to take what people like and keeps them on their old platform, and best preserve the intent of what they want on the new platform. Doing so requires discussing the features those big tech companies
And as users, when we select the platforms we use, we need to weigh the cost of going with an alternative vs going with a giant. No solution is a perfect solution for everyone, and the chooser needs to weigh the maintenance cost (in hours or money) they will incur, how their users will like/dislike it, and maybe even look at a piece of software and decide "nah the vibes are off".
I'd love a world where those three tech giants had proper competition in all fields, and I think their business practices are scummy and need improvement. But the real alternatives to each need some polish before they're ready to be used by [arbitrary tech illiterate grandmother].
I agree, it must continue.