Nobody mentioned Adobe yet. They’re absolutely the worst. They offer creative products behind a 70$ / month paywall and they hold a monopoly in their field. Only need their software sporadically? Sorry, no plan for you.
They haven’t significantly updated some of their software in like 20 years. I currently have the displeasure of using After Effects again and apart from not even supporting system dark mode on macOS or even fullscreen mode, there are all kinds of weird small bugs that you just get used to when using the software for a while.
Remember kids. It is always morally correct to pirate adobe products.
I'm a graphic designer and honestly, been thinking long and hard about switching to Affinity. Affinity Designer even seems like it would streamline most of my workflow.
I switched to Affinity! It's great. Not all of the features are there but most of them. It's also much less buggy and the interface is way better thought out.
They don't make a replacement for After Effects though, that's why I'm stuck with it for one project.
Affinity designer is a great tool if you are looking to use it. I can't say for the newer versions due to reasons, but some 4 years ago that I tried it, it absolutely blew me away. Easy to use, lots of advanced features, stable, great pricing. And they got a v2 as well, unfortunately v1 customers will need to rebut though at a discounted price.
They’re also the company who mainstreamed the software subscription model.
It used to be that only services required subscriptions. Applications would be a one time payment. But, Adobe converted to the subscription model and because they hold a monopoly over the design space, people/companies had no choice but to go along. Once they were successful, every business in the world decided that they also wanted that sweet monthly payment and now software licensing sucks.
I refuse to even pirate Adobe products on principle.
The suite itself. Being able to drop photoshop files into after effects and after effects files into premiere timelines while being able to go back and edit any piece is huge for efficiency.
Microsoft - erosion of any motivation to understand your PC so they can put whatever they want in their updates and you won't know until you dig through the logs
Facebook - erosion of any critical thinking by rewarding echo chambers and groupthink. Just look at their Metaverse shite.
Amazon - erosion of labour standards and publishing anti-union propaganda to prevent workers from realising they're being abused. Also, instituting anti-competitive measures and strongarming third party sellers.
OpenAI (insert any LLM/generative model company) - erosion of the creative process thus allowing people with zero artistic expression to plagiarise other artists' work
EA (or any AAA studio but also Nintendo) - erosion of consumer rights to own the products they buy and preventing any effort to preserve their games AND THEN complaining about piracy.
For some cases, yes it was bad. Plenty of organizations used Twitter as a micro blog to keep interested parties up to date... Like a short concise RSS. That's what I primarily used Twitter for, for years, and that was Twitter at its best.
Twitter once was an online townhall where people can start any movement or use it to spread their movement to wide masses. These days it's just some shitty tool for propaganda.
They market themselves as a "big data" company, what they actually do is use "big data" in a way not unlike what Philip K Dick predicted in minority report. Instead of clarvoiant tank people it's extremely racist algorithms though.
They have been involved in a bunch of racist "crime preventing" pre policing stuff. I believe at the moment they're mostly used to round up migrants in the usa for whatever the fuck their border farce does over there.
Reddit did something pretty shitty this year and is the reason many of us are here.
Blizzard Activision if we are counting gaming companies with their sexual harassment controversies which have led to suicide (also the cosby suite), their shitty monetization schemes, and the utter ruination of most of their popular IPs
Id argue Blackrock is a finance company that uses tech rather than being a tech company. But the differences these days are pretty negligible. In my mind a tech company provides tech to end users (google fb etc). Maybe a fintech? But even then in my mind thats more like a start up “modern tech” bank rather than a classical bank.
Meta, XFormerlyKnownAsTwitter, Google are all pretty bad for society these days
Whichever contributes the most to anti-competitive corporate culture. Most problems at the end-user level can be solved by having sufficient competition (and some labor problems, too).
Unfortunately, there are plenty to choose from.
There's Microsoft's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. Comcast's creation of artificial legal barriers to competition by lobbying state and local lawmakers. And then there's Amazon doing it by sheer hard power to put competitors under (plus all their anti-union crap).
Amazon I'd advocate for the nationalization of, at least of AWS. Meta caused a genocide and just needs to go. There's nothing they can provide that another company can't. Yeah WhatsApp is entrenched in much of the world, but it doesn't have to stay that way.
Any company that engages in vendor lock-in, abuses copyright of creators through generative AI for profit, tracks users for profit/advertising, or censors content and people on their platform that suggest alternative platforms.
For me it's a tie between Oracle, Atlassian, and Microsoft.
All three of them have built their business models around intentional poor design = money for extra services. They could make their software easier and more functional, but they intentionally don't so because it would hurt their profits. That kind of greed is inexcusable to me.
It especially sucks if your company migrated from a working but "unsupported" wiki system to Confluence, importing all the pages and breaking all the links in the process.
If we're limited to just tech companies, it's gotta be Amazon. Their unfair business practices and horrible work conditions make them one of the most deplorable companies on the planet
Surprisingly. Xero. They are muscling their "partners", and screwing them for every penny they can get. Xero it turns out, has switched on enshitification and turned evil.
Maybe not quite so much these days. I use Outlook at work, but that's been the limit of my MS contact in tech for a few years now (apart from the odd Teams meeting I've been invited to). It used to be worse in terms of lock in, IMO.
I’m shocked they had an employee to answer the phone. I didn’t know you could even buy stuff from them anymore, makes me feel a tiny bit better about my old Kenmore refrigerator.
Most comments about GAFAM, they are really hostile and bad for overall tech.
But take a look at China's Tencent, that's what those big tech companies would have been if not regulations.
For example Tencent was literally blocking their chat app QQ if it detect on a computer an antvirus that was competion to their own antivirus.