Bonum Certa Men Certa

There's Life After (Death of) Microsoft

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 29, 2023

Bamboo Wall

THE overwhelming majority of people I speak to like to believe or to oversimplify things to the point where "end of Microsoft" means "GNU/Linux has won!"

This is a late 1990s mindset.

In reality, it is not that simple. Google does its own nefarious things that resemble Microsoft and in some ways Apple can be worse than Microsoft. Mr. Kuhn from SFC once said that the FSF, where he had worked, "did some anti-Apple campaigns too. Personally I worry more about Apple because they have user loyalty; Microsoft doesn't."

On a separate occasion he correctly noted that "Microsoft is unique among proprietary software companies: they are the only ones who have actively tried to kill Open Source and Free Software. It's not often someone wants to be your friend after trying to kill you for ten years, but such change is cause for suspicion."

I disagree with Mr. Kuhn on a lot of things, including the back-stabbing (SFC is a copycat of SFLC and FSF, just like the FSF-EEE that it is conniving with), but the observations above (more than a decade old) remain valid.

Microsoft is getting smaller and smaller. There many are Microsoft layoffs (contractors) that the media only reluctantly speaks about and buying a large gaming company might have more to do with Microsoft's rapidly-growing debt (far higher than the bidding price for Activision), which it wants to offload to another subsidiary while committing tax crimes.

Microsoft will not exist forever (no company ever does) and we need to focus on the underlying issues, concepts, methods... not just the brands. The brands just come and go.

We try to perpetually speak of Software Freedom. If more people did that, people who walk away from Microsoft won't end up with Google and Apple instead. Swapping masters is not the same as emancipation/liberation. █

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