<p><pre><code> "just like you couldn't run software without paying IBM and then Microsoft, back in those days..."
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Not sure I believe that one. IBM controlled a certain sector of the computer market in the 1970s but there was a lot of competition from DEC and other minicomputer vendors. The only time I got my hands on a 360-series (really a 370XA) machine was a 3090 I got to use in the Computer Explorers, but I saw all kinds of other "big" machines.<p><pre><code> ... Grumbling at cloud ...
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There's the interesting question of "whatever happened to personal blogging?" and related questions of people getting pissy about webcrawlers today. Back in the 2000s we'd get a dedicated or VPS and run WordPress on that and not think about egress charges. Today we imagine we're going to pick an SSG out of this list<p><a href="https://jamstack.org/generators/" rel="nofollow">https://jamstack.org/generators/</a><p>but probably not do it, but if we did we'd go through phases of: (1) dreading that we're going to be successful because we pay for every GB, (2) noticing that we get crawled by Chinese web crawlers 10x a day but never get a single bit of traffic from them, (3) noticing that Bing crawls us more than Google but sends us 1% of the traffic, etc.<p>I transitioned from Softlayer to AWS because of the sysadmin nightmares Softlayer kept giving me, yet the rent is too damn high in AWS in a way that creeps up on you slowly.<p><pre><code> ... text chat ...
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One of the top case studies in "why we can't have nice things". It's not just text but anything in the comms area, it's a place where Doctorow's "enshittification cycle" was first to appear. First a comms app is in a honeymoon period where they really have to win you over and your friends tell you "I'd like to call you on XYZZY" and you say "I don't want to deal with it" and they say "Seriously, XYZZY is great, it's like Skype was 15 years ago" And you try it and it works, but at some point they have people trapped in a two-sided market and don't have any reason to smooth out the onboarding and fix the bugs and pretty soon it is like the way Skype is <i>now</i>.<p>If these things interoperated there would be competition to make them better as opposed to psuedo-competition to steal away two-sided markets from failing produts.