For me it’s a tie between Oracle, Atlassian, and Microsoft.
All three of them have built their business models around intentional poor design = money for extra services. They could make their software easier and more functional, but they intentionally don’t so because it would hurt their profits. That kind of greed is inexcusable to me.
Whichever contributes the most to anti-competitive corporate culture. Most problems at the end-user level can be solved by having sufficient competition (and some labor problems, too).
Unfortunately, there are plenty to choose from.
There’s Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, and extinguish” strategy. Comcast’s creation of artificial legal barriers to competition by lobbying state and local lawmakers. And then there’s Amazon doing it by sheer hard power to put competitors under (plus all their anti-union crap).
I’m probably “woke” cause I don’t enjoy the fact that half of humanity is getting rear-ended by capitalism, or something like that. It’s also what they like to call people with the slightest amount of social consciousness. Or just anyone that’s not conservative or right-libertarian, as those tend to be the ones that constantly attack the idea of “wokeness”…
Always had a hard time with keeping my account or opening a new one, as they constantly demand you (or at least me, but I’ve read about a couple other users with the same experience) to hand over your phone number, which they will use for SMS based verification before you can log in.
It’s hard to find Voip numbers that work. If you try hard enough, they may even block your account irreversibly.
Maybe they are doing it to me because in my browser I block the web requests that are targeted at their tracking focused endpoint, which by the way was somewhat scummily renamed some time ago to “science”, so that popular inferior adblockers don’t block them.
Other than that, I’ve heard that r/discord is modded by their employees, who silence anyone (with deletion of post and blocking the user from the sub) who complains about these and similar things.
I haven’t read the last couple of updates, but when I did read their privacy policy at one point, it said they hold the rights to do whatever they wanted with all your message history or sell them. Not good imo.
Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.
Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it’s your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.
I would say Apple isn’t as severe as something like Meta or “X” but the amount of influence apple has over the industry is insane. There’s a reason why so many laptops are losing ports “because the MacBook has it” or why smartphones are stagnating and when they “innovate” they’re just removing more features like the SD card reader all simply because “Apple did it”. Hell, Windows has been trying to be like Mac OS for years from its flat minimal design to its oversimplification of its design to trying to make their own “eco system”. Apple’s influence can even extend beyond tech with their flat minimalist, corporate design being applied to every industry and building and design ever to be conceived in 2023. Everyone is trying to be Apple from Tech companies to fast food joints. Truly if we measure their influence and the power they carry moving entire industries to do various things. They are one of the most powerful company in silicon valley. Everything we hate about modern tech and how restrictive it is can be sourced all the way back to Apple.
This perfectly describes everything I’ve thought about them but couldn’t fully express, thank you.
This is the whole reason I switched to Linux computers and Sony phones. If I wanted an Apple product I’d buy an Apple product. Give me back my headphone jack dammit.
This is all very true within the US and in regards to companies that do a lot of business within the US. Globally though, they’re not nearly as big or influential.
For some cases, yes it was bad. Plenty of organizations used Twitter as a micro blog to keep interested parties up to date… Like a short concise RSS. That’s what I primarily used Twitter for, for years, and that was Twitter at its best.
Twitter once was an online townhall where people can start any movement or use it to spread their movement to wide masses. These days it’s just some shitty tool for propaganda.
I’m shocked they had an employee to answer the phone. I didn’t know you could even buy stuff from them anymore, makes me feel a tiny bit better about my old Kenmore refrigerator.
Amazon I’d advocate for the nationalization of, at least of AWS. Meta caused a genocide and just needs to go. There’s nothing they can provide that another company can’t. Yeah WhatsApp is entrenched in much of the world, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Any company that engages in vendor lock-in, abuses copyright of creators through generative AI for profit, tracks users for profit/advertising, or censors content and people on their platform that suggest alternative platforms.
ETA fun story from my onboarding group: They wanted us to be beta testers for a new internal training tool they had developed. On the surface, it was just a basic online course map with tests for each course, but god it was so, so much worse than that, and that was because of those damned tests. I don’t know who the fuck developed those tests, but I can’t even say it was someone who was learning programming on the fly, because that shit had to have been intentionally malicious. Questions that weren’t in the material, questions where the “correct” answer was clearly wrong, questions where the correct answer was hidden by the HTML tags. We brought that last one up to the corpo representative who was in charge of guiding us through this nonsense and her reaponse was, I shit you not, “what’s an ‘HTML tag’?” Comical doesn’t even begin to describe the level of IBM’s technical dysfunction.
They market themselves as a “big data” company, what they actually do is use “big data” in a way not unlike what Philip K Dick predicted in minority report. Instead of clarvoiant tank people it’s extremely racist algorithms though.
They have been involved in a bunch of racist “crime preventing” pre policing stuff. I believe at the moment they’re mostly used to round up migrants in the usa for whatever the fuck their border farce does over there.
Add comment