One specifically bad thing about BlackRock is them buying up huge swaths of single family homes which increases prices and makes it more difficult for anyone to own property. Then they rent them out to people after they were not capable of getting a mortgage.
But BlackRock is absolutely enormous so that is just a drop in the bucket of what they do.
Id argue Blackrock is a finance company that uses tech rather than being a tech company. But the differences these days are pretty negligible. In my mind a tech company provides tech to end users (google fb etc). Maybe a fintech? But even then in my mind thats more like a start up “modern tech” bank rather than a classical bank.
Meta, XFormerlyKnownAsTwitter, Google are all pretty bad for society these days
Nobody mentioned Adobe yet. They’re absolutely the worst. They offer creative products behind a 70$ / month paywall and they hold a monopoly in their field. Only need their software sporadically? Sorry, no plan for you.
They haven’t significantly updated some of their software in like 20 years. I currently have the displeasure of using After Effects again and apart from not even supporting system dark mode on macOS or even fullscreen mode, there are all kinds of weird small bugs that you just get used to when using the software for a while.
Remember kids. It is always morally correct to pirate adobe products.
I’m a graphic designer and honestly, been thinking long and hard about switching to Affinity. Affinity Designer even seems like it would streamline most of my workflow.
I switched to Affinity! It’s great. Not all of the features are there but most of them. It’s also much less buggy and the interface is way better thought out.
They don’t make a replacement for After Effects though, that’s why I’m stuck with it for one project.
That’s my experience. Less features (like still no object blending in designer), but much faster and smoother over all. Admittedly I haven’t used an Adobe product in a few years, but when I first switched I was amazed at how much more performant the affinity suite was.
Affinity designer is a great tool if you are looking to use it. I can’t say for the newer versions due to reasons, but some 4 years ago that I tried it, it absolutely blew me away. Easy to use, lots of advanced features, stable, great pricing. And they got a v2 as well, unfortunately v1 customers will need to rebut though at a discounted price.
They’re also the company who mainstreamed the software subscription model.
It used to be that only services required subscriptions. Applications would be a one time payment. But, Adobe converted to the subscription model and because they hold a monopoly over the design space, people/companies had no choice but to go along. Once they were successful, every business in the world decided that they also wanted that sweet monthly payment and now software licensing sucks.
I refuse to even pirate Adobe products on principle.
The suite itself. Being able to drop photoshop files into after effects and after effects files into premiere timelines while being able to go back and edit any piece is huge for efficiency.
If we're limited to just tech companies, it's gotta be Amazon. Their unfair business practices and horrible work conditions make them one of the most deplorable companies on the planet
Maybe not quite so much these days. I use Outlook at work, but that’s been the limit of my MS contact in tech for a few years now (apart from the odd Teams meeting I’ve been invited to). It used to be worse in terms of lock in, IMO.
Surprisingly. Xero. They are muscling their “partners”, and screwing them for every penny they can get. Xero it turns out, has switched on enshitification and turned evil.
Microsoft - erosion of any motivation to understand your PC so they can put whatever they want in their updates and you won't know until you dig through the logs
Facebook - erosion of any critical thinking by rewarding echo chambers and groupthink. Just look at their Metaverse shite.
Amazon - erosion of labour standards and publishing anti-union propaganda to prevent workers from realising they're being abused. Also, instituting anti-competitive measures and strongarming third party sellers.
OpenAI (insert any LLM/generative model company) - erosion of the creative process thus allowing people with zero artistic expression to plagiarise other artists' work
EA (or any AAA studio but also Nintendo) - erosion of consumer rights to own the products they buy and preventing any effort to preserve their games AND THEN complaining about piracy.
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.
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.
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.
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