Microsoft made contracts with its clients to automatically create M$ accts, for example, my .edu email acct was self hosted years ago, then magically I had a tightly integrated (oauth at first bla bla) M$ acct. Since I didnt ask for it, and I dont want it, I couldnt care less of I run afoul of them. Heck, please revoke it, atleast that would break their contract. AFICT my credentials for journals etc still rest with my .edu (its a problem that credentials are necessary at all). Skynet on the other hand is hell bent on using its monopoly to force me to make an acct:
Is this really still true? This isn’t meant to be a defence of Google by any means, but to me it seems Microsoft has adopted a lot of pervasive practices in recent years. To the point where they would actively add things like Minecraft installers in my personal windows machine with whatever tiny version of windows comes with a prebuilt PC used like a game console.
I guess it’s not privacy invasive to add a Minecraft commercial directly into my OS, but they seem to be doing more and more of that stuff as well through their “telemetry”. Though I suppose much of it is targeting enterprise rather than our personal privacy.
MS are doing shitty stuff but they are hardly the monopoly they were in the 90s. You can ignore and avoid Microsoft completely if you want these days. The same is harder for Google - most people at least will want to watch something on YouTube at some point.
This is going to depend on the market. If you consider enterprise I'd argue Microsoft are very much still a monopoly. A client of mine is in the process of removing their existing telephony solution, which has many more features than teams, for teams, because teams is bundled with the necessary Microsoft 365 to get all the Azure controls needed for regulatory compliance.
Most enterprise organisations killed off their different chat clients and phones and switched to teams in my area of the world. Not necessarily tech companies, but everyone else didn’t want the additional cost when Teams came “for free”.
Teams phone system is a significant additional licensing expense, it's definitely not free.
It's also not standards compliant, despite speaking a malformed version of SIP, so you can't just plug it into standard SIP Infrastructure and have it send and receive invites for calls, or send and receive SIP simple messages for texting.
Crowdstrike outage has shown that isn't even remotely true in comparison - Microsofts failure took out a lot of critical infrastructure. Killing Google search wouldn't come close.
