The only reason video games, Adobe products, MacOS specific apps, and all these other isolated platforms rig themselves to be monopolies is because they choose to be closed source.

The lie they tell people is that open source is more vulnerable because of source being open, yet we see nonstop vulnerabilities for the same closed source swindlers.

They rig everything because of capitalism. So long as the people behind the scenes are around to hoard more wealth on top of their greed, this will always continue.

There have been several opportunities to break up major tech monopolies and in each case, the relevant authorities failed. Imagine a world where Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, etc. were each less than 1/5th their current size, and meaningfully punished for breaking otherwise unenforced laws, and prevented from hiding their financial chicanery. The mind boggles.

Yeah, it certainly doesn't. What happened yesterday could've been easily avoided if so many countries and businesses had made their own in-house systems rather than depending on Microsoft...

But the problem is that for a lot of businesses, it just doesn't make financial sense to set up their own decentralised systems when centralised systems already exist, offering services way cheaper than you could ever make for yourself - unless there is a specific need it can't fulfill, or you already have appropriate staff and equipment to facilitate/maintain it on the cheap.

And it doesn't help that the general population also lean towards centralisation, all coralling where their friends and family are. And beating that momentum is almost impossible - heck, I'm still stuck using centralised chatting services because convincing anyone who doesn't already want to move with you is like pulling teeth, and worst part is, it only takes one minor inconvenience to undo all that convincing.

Having said all that, the one group I won't excuse is the Government and Public Sector. There's no excuse for tax-payer funded services to not be operating on their own services and/or using other sovereign services, rather than continuing to pump money out if their economy and into the hands of US tech giants!

"It doesn't have to be like this."

-Every system that is demonstrably horrible and propped up by people who are too apathetic, lazy, or tired to change.

A tale as old as time.

We would most likely have distributed computing everywhere if we let engineers finish their work on the next generation of operating systems, but IBM needed to sell mainframes. And who knows what the Web would be like if we didn't let Google write half of the modern RFCs...

jorts.horse is back??

But it has to be like something and there will be consequences of any system. TBH I'm fascinated by the possibilities that aren't too. But there are many more "broken" than fixed and that could matter who you are. Not saying it's great is it is, but I feel like we are at an end.