As someone who doesn't particularly like social networking sites, and especially dislikes Facebook compared to other social networks... I'd drop Facebook first. Heck, I only joined because I had to in order to add a page for a business I was working with.<p>Apple I could drop pretty easily too. An iPhone is nice, but it's not exactly the be all and end all. Any old Android phone could work well too.<p>Amazon... personally I'd be able to drop it easily, though most people would have more trouble there. That's because nowadays the products I mostly buy from there are computer accessories and games, and the latter is under serious competition from the likes of Steam, various digital download stores on consoles and even the companies themselves selling boxed versions.<p>Still can't imagine how people buy food on these sites. I mean, do you often like to wait for your food to be delivered? The supermarkets here are both pretty cheap and within walking distance.<p>Microsoft would be tough, simply because Microsoft Office is really important to me, and I'm really used to Windows at this point.<p>Google is arguably the toughest one to drop. Why? Mix of services needed (it's damn hard to promote a website about certain subjects without YouTube nowadays, and Gmail is very convenient) and the fact their alternatives are just nowhere near as good for a search engine. Which is depressing given how far downhill Google's own search results have gone recently...<p>But yeah, interesting to see the stats there.
I'm surprised that only 10% of people would drop Apple first. I would have guessed that way more than 10% of people don't own a single Apple product. I wonder if maybe the NYT's readership is biased toward Apple owners?<p>(My ranking: I'd drop Apple and MSFT easily since I don't use anything by either company. FB would be easy to drop but I do use it and would miss it a little. Amazon and Google would be significantly more work to let go of.)
This was interesting. It made me think about which services each provider has that I personally would really miss if they were to suddenly dissappear tomorrow, and the only one that would have a big negative effect would be google maps.<p>I don't use facebook at all. I can count the things I've ordered on amazon (in all 30+ years of my life) on one hand. I don't use microsoft or apple products unless I'm forced to because of some work related project. And this isn't even out of any crazy principles or anything. I simply like linux distros better than apple/msft. I use an android phone but mainly just the phone functionality personally (i.e. like a good ol nokia + gmaps).<p>Funny, I would of thought it would have effected me personally a lot more, especially me being a software developer and all. But honestly it would make my life a lot easier, then cross-platform would be just linux :)
1: Facebook, no question there. I never had an account, nor do I ever plan on getting one. This is one company I'd like to be rid of, please.<p>2: Amazon, there's plenty of other options and - at least in Europe - I don't see any specific advantage to Amazon anyway.<p>3: Apple, overpriced lifestyle is not my style and I don't particularly like their attitude in many ways, nor do I like the idea of them having enough cash to buy a small country. It is not so much that I begrudge them their success but that I wonder what that power will eventually be used for.<p>4: Microsoft, using Linux since 1992, OS/2 before that, another company I won't miss having around. Having said that, as long as Apple is around I'd like to keep Microsoft alive as well, just like I wanted Apple to be there to make sure Microsoft did not gain a 100% stranglehold on mainstream personal computing.<p>5: Alphabet - or should I just say Google. I use some of their products in 'customised' form, Android without Google-proprietary stuff, the search engine without persistent cookies. I don't have a Google account though so I'm not tied to them by more than a search setting in a browser (Seamonkey, Firefox, Chromium, ...). There are other search engines, there are other mobile operating systems.
Definitely Amazon. As a customer from New Zealand, their online shopping site is almost impossible to purchase from (any item I look at does not ship here), and some of their practices are so misleading as to be illegal in my country ('one click' buy X at price $Y, which when billed then includes another $Z for freight).<p>Never again.
I ranked in order of how easy it would be to get equivalent services elsewhere.<p>Amazon is a particularly good ecommerce site, but by no means alone in its class, and there are plenty of IaaS providers. (Getting locked in to AWS specific products is a bad idea anyway).<p>Microsoft products already have superior competitors on the marketplace. Retooling and retraining the entire business IT world will cost something, but it needs to happen anyway.<p>People have been trying to replace Facebook since it started; some new entrant will supplant it overnight.<p>No one is really competing with Apple on quality. I think it would take a long time for someone to replace its offerings with equivalently polished products, if it ever even happens (the demand for cheap stuff might be so strong that Apple is only viable because of brand inertia). I'd miss it.<p>Alphabet is unmatched in search, drive, email, and Bell Labs-style R&D moonshots. I doubt it's repeatable outside of the specific time and place from which it emerged.
I don't want to 'drop' Google, but I distrust them enough to want a escape plan, should things get bad. Thing is, they provide so much stuff, I don't know how I could possible ever migrate away.<p>I don't use any Apple stuff, except vary rarely iTunes for music purchases, because I've still got credit there from ~5yrs ago.<p>Amazon have little to no presence in Australia currently, but that could change.<p>I'd love to get away from Facebook, but as previously discussed[1], my nooby friends are the main thing holding me back.<p>Microsoft seem to have mostly picked up their game in recent years, so I have no problem with sticking with them. That said, I refused to fully integrate like I have with Google (mail, calendar, etc.), because their products just don't seem to work as well.<p>[1](<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14217083</a>)
5. Microsoft. Could arguably live without Windows and Office (via either OSX or Linux), but at present it underpins all that I do on a computer.<p>4. Alphabet. Alphabet/Google products are the next layer I use on top of MS products, therefore are the next hardest to remove.<p>3. Facebook. The next layer again; MS and Alphabet provide general case tools, FB is a particular implementation on top of those, so it would go before either of the above two.<p>2. Amazon. No Amazon in Australia anyway, no big loss.<p>1. Apple. Only Apple product/service I use is a keyboard. Happy to see it go.
Weird, I don't really use any of those companies. I switched away from Google (although I guess I still use Android and Maps, so not entirely), I don't own anything Apple makes, I don't buy things or rent services from Amazon, and I haven't used anything Microsoft in years.<p>I sometimes use Facebook to talk to non-close friends, although I do use Whatsapp daily, so I guess that counts too.<p>All in all, I don't think it's impossible to escape at least one of them.
- Facebook I think does more harm to the world on the whole (basically a chain-letter conveyor belt for a majority of the public), but slight good to me personally (able to keep in touch with people that would otherwise have disappeared from my life), so it was a toss-up of interpretation whether to dump it first or second.<p>- Killing MSFT would do a lot of short-term economic damage, but the new innovation that happens to fill its place would probably be an easy net boon. Linux would be a fast replacement, and it would probably force that ecosystem to blossom. As someone who doesn't use any MSFT products (I have no need for them), I wouldn't personally suffer at all.<p>- Amazon is the center of online commerce, but I think it's already a fat, complacent company. Their infrastructure is famously good, but the purchasing experience is crap. Finding what you want is much harder than it should be for an online experience, and the recommendations are laughably bad. What takes its place would necessarily be much better.<p>- Apple's products are still a force of pressure on the market to innovate, though I suspect that will not be true for much longer. Their latest products are less clearly better than the competition, and they've made some bizarre design blunders. My next phone/laptop will likely <i>not</i> be Apple, so once their innovation dries up, seeing them disappear probably wouldn't make much of a difference in my life.<p>- Google and Gmail are still unparalleled. One could imagine something better than Gmail, but Google search is so core and effortless it's hard to picture what an improvement would look like. Deleting google would break the internet.
> Could you ditch them?<p>Yes, of course. All of them. I was alive before those companies existed, and life was more pleasant then in many ways. I already use Linux.<p>Google Search is a difficult one to replace in this line of work.<p>Google Maps is especially useful for people who tend to get lost, but I think it's also bad for people's brains, because it takes cognitive load off of the brain's navigation system, which is required for many cognitive tasks, including memory.* In any case, there would be other mapping companies to fill the space.<p>* It still needs more research, but this is interesting: <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm" rel="nofollow">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm</a>
Dropped microsoft fifteen years ago and never looked back. Dropped facebook seven years ago. Google is still useful but got bitten in my pockets by adsense so they are in my watch list. Mozilla, Amazon, Apple in high esteem but could be more user friendly and more innovative in their fields. Big media and big telcos, I don't care. Twitter, snapchat, instagram, never used them, don't care about social fads.<p>What else?
For me, the hard choice was whether to drop Facebook or Apple first, and then whether to drop Microsoft or Google last. I don't really use either Facebook or Apple (or Amazon either, I guess, but Amazon ended up in the "no opinion" category more than anything else)--I've not looked at Facebook in months, and I've not posted anything in years, and the newest Apple product I own is well over a decade old.<p>Ultimately, I'd drop Facebook first largely because I see Apple as still providing some value-add, whereas it's hard to see any value-add from Facebook. I ultimately dropped Microsoft last because they're the only ones who have made decent office productivity software (I say this having used both Corel's stuff long ago and LibreOffice for several years).<p>For all of the visualization stuff that the NYT does, I'm surprised that the visualization here is pretty sucky. Only bar graphs of the top and bottom choices? Really? That's the most you could come up with?
First drop for me is easily Microsoft. I have a gaming PC, and I keep it booted in Ubuntu unless a game requires Windows. I'm pretty sure I could boot into Windows less often if I used WINE, but I don't currently wanna deal with that hassle. The only other tools from Microsoft that I follow are TypeScript and Visual Studio Code, but I'm happily using Flow and WebStorm.<p>Second drop would definitely be Facebook. I feel like my Facebook feed is largely full of shitty memes. It'd be annoying to lose Messenger, but most of the contacts I regularly speak with are available through other means of communication. If I were closing my account I'd probably message a bunch of people to make sure I have their alternative contact info. I don't think I'd be able to easily drop React and Flow. Migrating away from their ecosystem would be incredibly challenging for me.<p>I can't drop Amazon, Apple, or Google.
Fascinating to see that people choose to drop fb first in most cases. I'm wondering how many are considering WhatsApp as part of fb. In my case I could drop fb and Instagram tomorrow. WhatsApp? That'd be really really really hard to just drop out of touch with family or force them to install something else.
I have never really used Apple or Facebook much, dropped Microsoft years ago, loss of support for my Kindle would be at most a minor inconvenience but Google? Crippling.<p>I use G Suite both privately and at work, basically run my life via Calendar/Maps/Keep, and get a nervous twitch in my left eye just at the thought of what a massive hassle it would be to first switch, and very likely second -- maintain the alternative.<p>That's even before I consider that there would be no Google to turn to when configuring that alternative, that my phone would essentially become a Nokia E52 with a larger screen (no Google Apps, no Uber without Google Maps, not even the local bus/directions app would work, not sure about Signal), and I that would need to dig up a ton of data from a cold, cold storage.<p>On a lighter note, NYT is now writing HN-tailored clickbait. We captured the zeitgeist.
From the perspective of what the impact would be if these companies disappear:<p>Apple would be the easiest to lose. They mostly just design high end consumer products that we don't particularly need and the gap could be filled by others. Foxconn would have to find another design studio to outsource to.<p>Hardest would be MS. The impact wouldn't be immediate but there would be a made scramble to replace all sorts of business software (internal and external) to other platforms. There would also be some massive hardware compatibility issues to deal with while doing so. I'd quit my job and make bank "porting" c# projects to mono, maybe even do some win32 to wine work.<p>Of course that depends on how much you use the online services of any of the companies too. The only impact on me would be the loss of gmail, but I'd get over it pretty quick.
My order was :<p>1. FB (because it doesn't serve any really important meaningful purpose... I much prefer reddit),<p>2. Apple: Because I hate apple products and their closed walled gardens when it comes to building apps and things (I'm android/linux desktop user).<p>3. MS: DOn't much use any of their products anymore, but did for a long time, and if I were to leave linux I'd probably go back to windows, since I like custom built computers.<p>4. Amazon: Love amazon, great deals - only place I shop, but if they didn't exist I'd probably find somewhere else using google.<p>5. Alphabet: Self-driving cars, android, youtube, gmail, search (I've tried bing, etc... but no other search provider gives the quality of results -- esp for coding questions), and they're even my isp: Google FIBER... so yeah this one would be a hard one to sever for me.
I chose Facebook as my number 1 and Alphabet as my number 2.<p>He then goes on to rant about how amazing and utterly irreplaceable and amazing Google is and how difficult my life must be not using Google services.<p>The contrary is true. It's very easy not to use Google services and they are very replaceable.
I dropped all except Amazon, because books are cheaper there. The cockroach is Amazon.<p>Google was surprisingly easy to drop. I use DuckDuckGo and quit GMail.<p>Microsoft I dropped more than a decade ago.<p>I never used Facebook.<p>I half-dropped Apple by switching away from Mac OS X, but I still own in iPhone that I'll drop when it breaks.
In order of what I could easily/already drop:<p>Facebook: Never had Facebook<p>Apple: Don't use any Apple products<p>Alphabet (Google): 90%+ searches are now through DuckDuckGo for me<p>Amazon: Needed as online shopping often through Amazon, and I still buy a lot of books through them<p>Microsoft: Must have, my life is intimately tied to Excel
The easiest to drop for me would be Facebook and Amazon.<p>I enjoy Apple and Google. products and don't see a need to drop.<p>Microsoft doesn't have a big impact on my personal life anymore. It wouldn't be feasible to remove them fro, my personal life, however.
I stopped using Facebook and Twitter for a few months. Once the initial pains of withdrawal subsided, I couldn't even remember that was something I wanted to check. Don't need either one of them.