Microsoft has gone decades doing everything they can to ensure Windows is what people think of when they think of computers and its worked.
I agree, I think Google has done an even better job brainwashing people to the point that any search online is considered 'Googling', still makes me cringe to hear ppl unknowingly shill for a corporate monopoly without even consciously knowing they are a walking advert for Alphabet's data harvesting empire.
Windows 11 is also much better at collecting personal data with improved analytics and Microsoft spyware running under the hood. Not to mention it's superiority at serving advertisements and embedding them in nearly every aspect of the UI.
It's doubtful that Microsoft shareholders have meetings about how to improve the user experience of their OS. I think they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can designing the most efficient backend to harvest data and push ads, kinda like our friends at Alphabet, Microsoft is trying so desperately to emulate.
I'll never understand corporate apologists that live to defend the billion dollar companies ruining the Internet. Google is an ad company, but you can't believe they'd alter search queries to sell ads? How could you possibly trust Google after they've been caught illegally sniffing people's Wi-Fi with their Google Maps vehicles, spying on kids in school with Chromebooks and destroying incriminating documents in a federal court case to hide their actions?
If you care so much about avoiding analytics and advertising why on earth are you "googling" your questions on the world's largest advertising and analytics website?
Piracy is being proliferated by government's inability to enforce anti-trust laws and protect consumers. We need another Roosevelt to come in and break up the monopolies corrupted by power and greed. When the government is too weak and corrupt to represent people's interest they find another way to take care of themselves. I'm personally quite liberal and inclined to socialism, but I as write this comment I can feel some connection to the libertarian creed of not depending on a centralized authority to take care of things that could be handled more effectively at the individual or community level.
Sometimes moneygrubbing shareholders do us a favor by steering companies into implementing terrible policies. If Reddit wouldn't have been so greedy with it's treatment of third-party app developers most of use wouldn't be on Lemmy right now. If Microsoft forces Windows users to pay a subscription I think it sends more people away from closed-source garbage and into the arms of the open source community. I've enjoyed watching Reddit implode, hopefully I get to watch a similar show from our friends at Microsoft.
In my experience the suffering of losing a romantic love is less intense the second time, but the falling in love and passion can also be less intense and take longer to build up as you're more guarded with your heart after being heartbroken before.
If the choice is paying unreasonable prices for Apple's overpriced proprietary nonsense or reducing my yield as another data cow in Alphabet's surveillance capitalism human farming machine, I begrudgingly pick the former.
I think it's safe to assume all corporations publicly traded are equally greedy, regardless of how much their marketing department assures us that they exist for altruism.
Shareholders don't by stock to make the world a better place, they invest in the companies sending the largest dividend checks. Apple and Alphabet are equally covetous of our money (money and data for Alphabet), but I trust the old business model of selling hardware more than giving up my data forever to be used for anything in the future.
GrapheneOS is my true preference currently for personal use and it feels good to leave a corporation in favor of a community, much like my switch from Reddit to Lemmy. As the techie in my family and friend group I'm still going to have to recommend iOS to most people since using GrapheneOS as a daily driver is a big ask for my grandmother.
Using an advertising company for anything and expecting objective results is a bit ridiculous. Use DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, MetaGer, anything but Google.
Pirating gives me the option not to support shit corporations that fuck over consumers with no business ethics. I can pirate the content I choose and pay for it when I want to support creators.
Historically, pirating and underground markets for good and services begin to proliferate in a society as a sign that their economic system is failing. IMHO, unbridled capitalism and corporate shitification in the US is turning the Internet into a hellscape with 5 companies basically controlling the entire Internet with so much lobbying muscle behind them they remain untouchable through what remains of the democratic system.
I think it's time to revisit the question of why these corporations exist as "people" under the law, when they clearly operate without humanity. The perversion of justice that granted them this right was taken directly from the 14th Amendment in 1886. That amendment was written to grant citizenship to freed slaves. What a coincidence that slavery ended, but was immediately replaced with a new structure called corporations.
Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it's fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it's products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don't want to support Google's enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc...