Months before the pricing change went into effect Microsoft sent me a detailed email about how to stay on the old pricing plan.

I don't appreciate being auto migrated, but they did originally provide instructions on how to not be migrated.

If you don't mind me asking, how long was it from switching until this happened?

That case is from 1919 and it doesn't say what most people think it says.

The problem there was that Ford was trying to claim he could do whatever he wants because he has the most votes, minority shareholders be damned. In practice what companies do now is that they do whatever they want and come up with some explanation for why it's in the interest of the shareholders, e.g. charitable donations are tax deductions and strengthen the company's brand with customers, instead of explicitly telling the other shareholders to eat sand.

The real problem with modern companies is diffuse ownership. You invest your retirement money in some fund, the fund is the thing that actually elects the board and what the fund wants is to increase profits, and typically short-term profits at that, so they elect a board to do it and that's what happens. It's not because the law requires them to do that, it's because that's the result of that incentive structure. And then all the companies that you own as a shareholder are out there screwing you over by double when you're their customer.

Whereas if you have a company owned and operated by the same people, then they can say "hey wait a minute, this is only going to increase short-term profits by a small amount and it's going to make everyone hate us, maybe we shouldn't do it?" Which is the thing that's missing from large publicly-traded companies.

> stronger antitrust enforcement

This is the other thing that's missing. Even if companies are trying to screw you, if they have a lot of competition then they can't, because you'd just switch to one that isn't. But now try that in a market where there are only two incumbents and they're both content to pick your pocket as long as the other one is doing the same.

Unsurprisingly Friedman was lauded and rewarded for this behavior.

To be very clear:

Companies absolutely do not have any responsibility to maximize short-term profit.

They have a responsibility to not actively and intentionally destroy the company, and to not use the company's resources for purely personal gain in a way unrelated to the company.

That's it.

This is also why you never hear about any company getting sued for anything related to this (let alone succesfully). Because it doesn't happen, as it's not a thing and any lawyer would immediately tell you you don't have a case.

Turns out computers weren't different at all, they just hadn't caught the full attention of government and business yet.

They are not asleep. They were intentionally weakened, step by step.

Look I am computer savvy enough to "fix" Windows I can live with it but I advised my mom to get an Apple laptop.

And it seems other companies see them and think "hey, can we do that as well?" (Like the issue of this article...)

Meta with its exploiting of children's (and adults') insecurities is probably worse though.

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I work with spreadsheets made of more than two cells with LibreOffice. The lack of dark patterns to trick me into cloud saving, ribbon with random buttons everywhere and animations makes everything feel much more comfortable to use.

Data linking a CSV in Excel opens a UI where it seems one can do many conversions and adjustments. It looks very powerful but it also makes it slow to link a CSV file. In LibreOffice it's less powerful but so much faster.

> Work with spreadsheets more complicated than two cells.

I use both daily. You're misrepresenting what LibreOffice can do; 99% of the people I see using excel are using the exact same 20% of its capabilities.

Quick-n-Dirty database that they can update during sales meetings and create charts from. You think another spreadsheet can't do that?

The features don't matter as long as people put up the price for what they require. The job of the salesman/marketing team is to bet on a balance that will net the company money. The features are just the sales pitch that convince you you need the latest and greatest (comparable to a sports car salesman selling you the new v8 model instead of the more economical v6).

Are Microsoft just in to deep at this point? They killed one off their flagship brands (Office) in favour of Microsoft 365 Copilot, shouldn't someone be fired for that decision at this point?

I'm looking forward to the books and articles in 10 - 20 years time, attempting to explain what happened internally at Microsoft these past years.

Presumably the hyperscalers can begin conflating the number of “agents” created with “boring jobs eliminated” and thus herald the industrial revolution.

But first: Your subscription price is increasing and now includes 5 Agents.