When the leading tech companies’ business models literally include theft, analysis, censorship, and possible resale of private user data, maybe the market is over BOUGHT. Facebook got caught with its pants down selling user data to political procurers. Google just got caught scanning files unrelated to Chrome on users’ hard drives for “viruses.” Also censoring nudity on Google Drive. Microsoft just cracked down — their new ToS bans profanity on Skype… Apple is moving towards locking down MacOS, iOS style with a new processor platform. Probably heavily nudging people to their “cloud” as well. List goes on… everyone (Adobe/MS) is pushing software rental. Rent-seeking off of software that often just worked for 5-10 years.
We’ve gone from time-share computing, to personal computing, full-circle around to time-share corporate-controlled computing. At least with traditional time-share computing, the entity running the central computer was a known one like a university, not a faceless megalith like Google.
What do you call what’s going on in the markets over the past few months? A good start. Let the house of cards collapse so we can rebuild it in a less horrible way.
