The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their marketing department, they just inject themselves into everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100% lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored.
With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway.
It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?
This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.
Stupid people think that because they're making a good living under capitalism (many on HN), it's a good system. All the ads on websites and shitty bosses and vendor lock-in and declining support options are "accidents" that would get better if "companies stopped being evil." No. It incentivizes evil.
Capitalism is the reason the internet sucks. If you don't agree, think about it longer and consider if it might actually be true.
Capitalism is the reason the Internet exists. Instead of just complaining, why don't you recommend an alternative. One that hasn't starved and murdered millions of people, such as communism. It's childish to denounce an entire system, with no bloody idea at all about what to do instead, except idealistic utopian dreams... like we'll all just get along and prosper, if only capitalism didn't exist.
The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. They worked at places as varied as the French government-sponsored computer network Cyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, the University of Hawaii and Xerox. But the mothership was the US defense department’s lavishly funded research arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) – which later changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – and its many contractors. Without Arpa, the internet wouldn’t exist.
There may have been worldwide influences, but there is a reason it took hold and flourished in the United States, and other capitalist countries first. It all happened with capitalism in full swing, it was financed and built with the engine of capitalism driving it. It's disingenuous to pretend that capitalism is the problem and what is actually holding things back. It's childish and destructive. God pray we don't actually get to find out what these envious, spiteful people will spawn if they manage to destroy the system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other invented by man. They have no plan, or indeed any clue, what will arise out of the ashes.
> but there is a reason it took hold and flourished in the United States
Because we're special. Full stop. I talked like this when I was a teen. "How are you gonna run your computers if you destroy us" (because we were the only people who could make software and computers).
> get to find out what these envious, spiteful people will spawn if they manage to destroy the system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other invented by man.
We generated a lot of wealth via slavery. Do you get it? The USA has exploited and HARMED other countries. If you're unaware, research it. Did your clothes become cheap because workers in Indonesia got a fair paywage similar to your loved ones? Or were people paid almost nothing to finance your lifestyle.
Oh, also the countries who hate a bully are envious and spiteful. It has nothing to do with throwing our weight around to eliminate and install autocrats because we love democracy and freedom.
The Internet was initially developed for the military and then extended for academic use. Capitalism wasn't needed to create it. And neither does "not the capitalism we have in the west today" equal to "soviet communism" - it's neither a binary distinction nor is it a one dimensional spectrum.
It wouldn't have become the internet of today without capitalism. The government / military certainly didn't finance everything that happened after it was created.
It's a version of the principal-agent problem, with the added wrinkle that principals have low barriers to exit. Both the management and investors share the incentive structure of a con artist.
Capitalism - in principle - doesn't even require that investors as such exist, much less that they own everything. That our current system has evolved into a pseudo-capitalist system which introduces all sorts of State created constructs (like corporations), and borrows elements from fascism, socialism, etc., doesn't mean that it must be this way.
I was responding to GP, who stated "capitalism means ownership by investors", and then used that definition to make the argument that "it is the investors who ruin your product."
So in this context, the "theoretical fact" as you put it, is relevant.
More generally, I would argue that such things are relevant because we're all using words to communicate, and it helps a great deal if we all understand what those words and phrases actually mean.
I was talking about Actually Existing Capitalism, not hypothetical scenarios that don't obtain in the world we're subjected to. It is a diagnosis, not a theoretical law of nature.
When it comes to communicating, the meaning of a word is how it is used in practice. Use creates meaning. In practice, capitalism means ownership by investors. In the world that exists, the Capitalist Class is the Investor Class, and the dynamics created by this reality have caused non-hypothetical products to be ruined time and again.
Proprietorships and partnerships where the management is also the owner(s) are an older economic system that predates the innovations of modern capitalism. Even businesses that begin this way commonly seek investment capital, get bought out or go public. The ones that don't are considered stable and therefore uninteresting, such as lawyers, but private equity will eventually gobble them up too.
If you look at the products that have avoided enshitification, they are the ones that have avoided or subjugated investors.
Investors don't run the company, they don't make product decisions on a day to day basis. They may demand growth and they may be able to fire the CEO if enough of them band together but that requires them to convince the board first (and if they can't then they may be able to fire some or even all of the board). Anyway, as long as none of that has happened I think this is an academic position at best.
With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway.
It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?
This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.