> Microsoft is the enemy

This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeezing money out of the pockets of their users now.

This has been happening with Video Games for a while. There is a major initiative called "Stop Killing Games" which was triggered when Ubisoft bricked "The Crew" when servers were shutdown.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

There has been some success. There is new legislation in California which has passed the Assembly. https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/22330/stop-killing-game...

And there is a citizens initiative in Europe which the the European Commission must respond to: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

If you consider that profit is a function of price and cost, and price is a function of scarcity (i.e. demand relative to supply), then over time, logic dictates that a strategy of profit maximization will work to create scarcity as soon as the profit curve plateaus. In economic orthodoxy, the only defense against this is the hope that there is more than one supplier and that they will remain adversarial, which is not an equilibrium state if you consider that a strategy of cooperative pricing and supply curtailment can at times maximize profits more effectively than competitive oversupply. Perhaps we've been judging the benefits of unregulated free markets based solely on our observations of the first half of the profit curve. Perhaps we're now seeing many of the world's markets moving to the latter half.

You didn't start using libreoffice.org like 15 years ago?

Hard agree. In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.

And of course companies like Microsoft or the car companies in your example have experimentally determined that the less transparent and immediate the product transaction is, the less likely some percent of their customer base will fully understand exactly what it is they are giving and receiving in turn from each of the companies that supposedly providing them value.

The answer is not to simply boycott, but to actively and aggressively punish companies for acting with this particular brand of capitalist maliciousness. It includes being vocal online but also pushing for more aggressive countermeasures against unchecked greed. Billionaire taxes, closing corporate tax loopholes, consumer protection, expanded antitrust, right to repair, labor rights. All of the policies that are “bad for business”. Because fuck them, policies that are good for business have only led to exploitation of the masses and we get nothing in return but more creative value extraction.

It’s past due we have sympathy for the corporate bottom line and time we start to get excited when companies bleed a little in the face of policies and regulations that absolutely do not care about corporate interest.

No, I think we do need legal protection. We have so many high quality protections when it comes to real-world items -- they could be better, but if companies are going to move everything on line, and put tech in everything, they can goddamn give us the same level of protections.

As this is only a problem for people/companies who have willingly decided to be customers of Microsoft, I'm having a hard time getting outraged over this.

This is how they've always behaved, and anyone who is surprised by this hasn't been paying attention for the last 30 years.

> Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software.

I'm surprised that going through the legal system is already seen as completely useless, but calling for a consumer mass boycott would totally work...

I think it's a vanishingly small number of consumers buying Office compared to businesses.

"Their lawyers will win" is plainly wrong assumption if something is clearly illegal.

I agree. Take what ya can, give nothing back!

I never used anything by Microsoft since I bailed to Macs after Windows 8.. and with Nintendo, PlayStation and CrossOver etc for games I never even felt the need to.

Every time I took a look at Windows once every few years it still reeked of shit.

A happy 10~ years ..until they bought GitHub. Then they crippled the Visual Studio Code Extensions Marketplace so VSCodium users couldn't easily install some extensions.

Coincidentally I was just in a YouTube rabbit hole of old operating systems and computing platforms in the 1980s and 90s and how Microsoft killed them with scummy tactics, like sending suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers and threatening to pull the Windows license if they even OFFERED users an OPTION for alternative OSes!

Fuck Microsoft. Bill Gates deserves a few more pies in his face.

I gave you an upvote. How many downvotes did you get?