Comment by al_borland
4 days ago
The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows.
If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
Pretty sure this would be the only way the rest of the world (except China) dumps US tech services, so it sounds great.
> mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium
I would hardly notice, TBH.
There are alternatives for all of that.
Good for you. That doesn't change that millions of people rely on these daily, including many less technically inclined.
Real change starts with real pain. People aren’t interested in obsessively checking privacy settings in apps or disabling tracking everywhere and I don’t expect them to. Governments don’t protect them because of gestures widely at status quo. People will realize those services are important and there will be a massive realignment. That’s how I expect things will go.
Microsoft is already pivoting away from consumer products.