With governments continuing to lean into investigations of “big tech,” I was reminded of something I read in 2017 in which Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times asked “Which Tech Giant Would You Drop?” via an interactive article. I found it a surprisingly easy question to answer. Below are my responses, from easiest to hardest.
Microsoft
I use and support Windows at work, and have opened an Office app from time to time to help others, but I haven’t personally used anything Microsoft for several years. And to think that Word was my most frequently used app at one time.
I have a Facebook account solely because one was required to set up Asia’s page. At one time I thought about giving Instagram a shot for photography sharing, but I didn’t like its limitations. With Facebook’s poor privacy history1 and dishonesty about their business practices, I have no desire to engage with them further.
Google (Alphabet)
I use Google services constantly at work, and they do have powerful tools. But I find myself using their services less and less personally. I use Apple Maps instead of Google Maps because the latter has become more and more confusing to use, with inaccurate travel times. I don’t have the need to use Google Docs, Sheets and Slides at home like I once did. I have a Gmail account and the SPAM filtering is very good, but I moved to my own host recently and never liked the Gmail web interface or mobile apps2. I use DuckDuckGo3 as my search engine, rarely falling back to Google when needing to find things.
YouTube would be the most difficult part of the Google world to give up. Repair videos in particular have been invaluable.
Amazon
Sure, there are a lot of bad things about Amazon—their effect on local businesses, sale of counterfeit merchandise, treatment of their employees—but they remain the definitive online one-stop shopping resource, saving me time and money.
I watch a fair amount of Prime Video, too.
Apple
Giving up my Macs, iPhones, Apple TVs, and HomePods would mean starting over, and I wouldn’t be thrilled with my choices. I know Windows, Chrome OS, and many of the home assistants through experience, and as much as folks may want to complain about the bugginess of Apple’s software in recent years, they still offer the most stable and consistent experience by far.
Apple remains the most privacy focused of the companies on this list, and they can afford to be because their earnings are tied to hardware sales and services. The same can’t be said of Google4, Amazon, or Facebook.
TechRepublic has a nice cheat sheet of events pertaining to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, which is illustrative of Facebook’s lack of concern for user privacy. ↩︎
Spark, Canary, and Apple’s Mail apps all provide better front ends to Gmail. ↩︎
DuckDuckGo is a privacy focused search engine alternative to Google that can be made the default in most browsers. I think the results are cleaner as well. ↩︎
Many folks believe Google is making money from the sale of Chromebooks and Android devices, but they don’t because they give away the operating systems and others build the hardware (with the Pixel line being the exception). They make money from those devices via ads and the data collected while those devices are in use. ↩︎