[cringepirate]

No you got it the wrong way around. The power is in the hands of the user.

> That will never happen as long as shareholders are the only people that companies are legally beholden to

The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them.

> That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users

The user can simply stop using the software if the developer doesn't respect their time (happiness is a completely subjective property dependant on the individual).

So I say this will never happen while people won't actively move for alternatives and put up with crappy products.

I made the effort to stop using products from large companies that don't respect my privacy and don't respect freedom of speech of their users. So whenever possible I don't use any products from the large tech companies.

If people can't be bothered and choose to be ignorant, they deserve what they get.

[BearfootCoder]

That only works if the user of the software has freedom of choice over the software they use. For the majority of commercial software sales that is not the case. Commercial software is overwhelmingly brought by companies who dictate to their staff what software they must work with.

And the companies which shell out the big bucks to keep terrible software products shambling along for year after year don't really do it because they hate they staff and want to screw up their happiness and productivity, although it can often seem like that. They do it because either there isn't anything else which does the thing they need to keep doing their business, or becuse they have so much past history and experience of using that product that it would be ridiculously expensive and dangerous to change or because they believe that the pain of supporting fifty different users using thirty different incompatible pieces of software to do the same job is worse than the pain of having all those users screwed up at the same time by an upgrade that goes bad.

None of which are unreasonable positions to take and all of which push the responsibility for improving the situtaion back to where it belongs: the writers and suppliers of the upgrade. Upgrades should adopt a hippocratic principle: the change that YOU make to the system which I have paid for and which I rely on to do my job should not suddenly impossible costs or make it impossible me to use it to do something that I was doing yesterday.

And that, in turn, is not going to happen, unless and until customers (both commercial and private) have the right to compensation for lost time and earning imposed by changes which benefit nobody except the software vendor.

[cringepirate]

The article is talking about forced updates by vendors of consumer grade software. That is what we are talking about.

Also the same rule still applies. If I had to use some terrible software everyday I would leave a job if it was that bad. I had to develop on a terrible CMS, once I realised it was never going to change, I looked for another job.

[Sabinus]

Governments are supposed to intervene in markets to keep them stable, functional and ethical. Hand-balling all market regulation to ethical individual consumption isn't workable for many industries where companies can monopolize, capture regulation and sway public opinion with advertising campaigns.

[cringepirate]

Unfortunately I should have expected a reply such as this. Everything is seen as a all or nothing proposition.

I think it is pretty obvious that if companies are abusing their position to that extent an appropriate governing body should step in. However there are going to be issues that won't fall under such a remit.

Also just because the government/regulator is failing to step in, doesn't mean you can't be doing something yourself. I was getting very frustrated with Google and its products. So I decided to stop using them whenever possible.

As for moving away from industry giants, this works. Firefox (back in the early 2000s) chipped away at IE's monopoly and broke the stagnation.

[FridgeSeal]

> The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them.

Yeah, much like how I get a choice to not use Jira at work, or to not use Facebook Messenger or not use LinkedIn right? The argument that everything ultimately comes down to individual user choice ignore so many externalities that it’s borderline unrealistic.

[denkmoon]

I have a social life without facebook, and I have a job without linkedin. You don't need them, you choose to use them.

[tomc1985]

> If people can't be bothered and choose to be ignorant, they deserve what they get.

The problem is that those that do care also have to suffer. After a certain point of critical mass, when it comes to tech, oftentimes you can't just take your business elsewhere any more.

[cringepirate]

This is incorrect. You can almost always take your business elsewhere. It depends whether you think it is worth it, depending on how hard it makes the rest of your life.

If people really cared (as much as they claim) you will make alternatives work for you.

[spirobel]

what about adobe though? what if you work in a field where you are forced to use a certain proprietary file format or software? this sounds a bit naiive. go talk to real johnnys :-)

[cringepirate]

The last time I checked there was many competitors to Adobe in almost all the products they offered. You aren't forced to use their software at all.

In any event you can slowly move away from using a companies products. It isn't a all or nothing proposition.