Beating Big Tech at the Real Computer (Rip-Off) Game

The real computer game in the computer industry pits computer manufactures and software makers against their customers. They win when they succeed in forcing us to spend more money on their products. We win when we spend less to get the computer hardware and software we actually need.

For decades, Big Tech won the game by creating software that would only run on the latest hardware. The game was rigged in their favour until about 15 years ago, because computer CPU's doubled in speed about every 18 months and new standards like PCI and USB and new peripherals like CD and DVD drives were being introduced all the time. Now, the game is in our favour, because let's face it, not much innovation has occurred in the computer industry in a decade and a half. The speed of CPU's is still increasing, and new standards are still emerging, but much more slowly than before. Today, many if not most ten-year-old computers work perfectly well for word processing, surfing the Internet, watching movies, listening to music, and most of the other things average consumers do.

The deceleration of CPU speed increases has forced Big Tech to make increasingly desperate moves in the real computer game. They are very aware that they are losing, but they have only a few long-term options. Among them are dying slowly by continuing to playing the game by the current rules, changing the rules, or moving to a new playing field. But they still have the perennially effective strategies of built-in obsolescence, fact-less advertising, status envy, and lock-in to slow their losses until they can come up with more effective strategies.

Since the first computers designed for consumers came out in the 1970's, computer hardware and software makers have employed every conceivable strategy to force us to keep buying new computers. Ever slower software has been perhaps their most effective strategy. To force us to buy newer slower software they have resorted to tactics like making new file types for Microsoft Office that were incompatible with older versions and creating new versions of Microsoft Windows that would not run on older computers. Behind the scenes they have resorted to "recycling" programs in which they bought millions of old computers and shredded them into tiny pieces, so they could not be sold to those who could not afford to buy new computers. So, most consumers had no choice but to keep buying new computers. Fortunately, with EBay and other online sources, more of us can now buy used products much more economically than we can buy new ones.

Another advantage Big Tech has is that most consumers do not understand how much processing power they actually need in a PC.

Many think they need the latest generation Core i7 CPU to surf the Internet or write a letter. Increasingly inefficient software is part of the reason for this. We use Microsoft Office to write documents in part because we do not know about alternatives like Libre Office, Free Office, and Open Office. Many of us use Microsoft Outlook because we either do not know about or have not bothered to try alternatives, like for instance Thunderbird, Claws Mail, or even leaner faster Linux alternatives like Mutt. In the 1990's, Microsoft managed to slow its software by among other things running animated mazes, flight simulations, and other "Easter eggs" in the background that users did not know about until years later when someone made public the secret keystroke combinations that activated them. To this day, I have not seen proof that the animated Easter eggs were running only when the secret keystroke combinations were pressed and not all the time in the background. I find astounding the fact that for decades Microsoft has somehow managed to convince consumers that it knows nothing about what is actually running in its own software! Today, Microsoft Office and the latest version of Windows are so complicated that it boggles the mind to try to comprehend why they run so slowly.

Now, on top of waiting for Microsoft's slow software to load and run, we are forced to endure advertisements on our computers, because no matter how much a company earns, it always wants more. It will never be satisfied until it has extracted every last penny from us that it can. Even Apple is getting in on the advertising game, despite being by some measures the most profitable company on Earth. This in a nutshell is why computer hardware and software makers will never voluntarily stop playing the real computer game. Companies will continue to abuse their customers in order to extract ever larger profits until their customers decide that enough is enough and stop buying.

I think the fact that the thin-and-light fetish of computer manufactures began only three years after the death of Moore's Law, which occurred around 2005 by my estimation, may be significant.

Three years is about the time required to develop a new laptop line. Thin-and-light was their excuse for increased built-in obsolescence via the slow phase out of user replaceable batteries, RAM, and hard drives. Apple came up with the new strategy first with the MacBook Air in 2008, but the rest soon saw the value of thin-and-light to their bottom lines and copied it.

Fact-less advertising and status envy have always been two of the top tools applied by sales teams in many industries.

The combination encourages buyers to turn off their critical faculties and buy based solely on emotions, which are easier to manipulate. With this strategy, manufacturers give buyers no real information about their products. Instead they tell them they will be envied by their peers for owning them. The computer industry has even more of an advantage through the use of this strategy than most industries, because most computer consumers simply do not understand the technology they are buying. An uneducated buyer under the pressure of a status envy sales pitch is an easy mark. However, status envy seems to me to be declining in effectiveness. Apple products just do not seem to carry the same status as they did 20 years ago. Perhaps this is because thin-and-light laptops all look very similar across manufactures' product lines. Or, perhaps this is because for a few years Apple refused to sell PC's that most people wanted to buy. Or, perhaps the new generation is simply less easily fooled than previous generations into believing that status is important.

Apple has always been the king of lock-in.

With this strategy, a manufacturer of hardware or software intentionally makes products that are incompatible with every other product in the industry. This forces customers to buy only products made by that manufacturer. This was the rule in the computer industry in the 1970's, but in 1981 IBM came along with the IBM PC and by accident made a change that forced most computer makers to adopt a standard architecture. Usually, a customer only begins to understand that he has been duped after purchasing a high priced item and then realising that he cannot buy lower priced accessories made my other manufacturers.

For example, when a buyer spends $3000 on a new laptop from Apple, he soon learns that he needs all new cables, because the ones he has are incompatible with the ports on his new laptop. He also learns that Apple cables are multiple times the price of ALL other cables! He must also buy only Apple peripherals that are compatible with the ports on his laptop. And he can only purchase software from the Apple store, unless he is more knowledgeable than the average consumer and understands how to load other software using alternative means.

Perhaps the computer industry's smartest strategic move in the last five years or so has been slowly and carefully luring us onto a different playing field where they once again have the advantage. This is in effect changing the rules of the game.

The new playing field is the cloud. In the cloud, they have total control of both hardware and software.

For example, someone running Windows 8 on his laptop can use any video conference program he wants - Zoom, Webex, GoToMeeting, Zoho Meeting, or any one of a number of others. Although Teams and Zoom can be used together with some Microsoft software, if Microsoft chooses to force us to use Teams and only Teams in its cloud, Microsoft can simply refuse to allow anything else to connect to its servers. If it can then lock us into its cloud by making Windows a cloud-only operating system and successfully negotiating with its partners to manufacture computers that only run the Windows operating system, it will be in a very strong position.

Microsoft and others are attempting to lure us into the cloud by making us believe that their cloud services will be free or lower cost than the software and personal computers we already use.

They hope the rising generation is too young to have parents or grand parents who remember the 1980's and the reasons we began using personal computers in the first place, the extremely high cost of mainframe computing time and the ability to run any software we want on our own computers. The false promise of free or lower cost is a strategy that has worked many times in the past. It worked for YouTube. It worked for Amazon. And, it worked for Facebook and a variety of Google products. But whether we are paying with our hard-earned money or paying with our attention focused on their advertisements, eventually we will pay, and we will pay more. At least, that is their plan. If they actually believed they would make less money on cloud services than they have from their usual computer hardware and software sales, they would never have begun pushing us in this direction.

Whether we wise up and refuse to go along with this is up to us.

Something else that Big Tech has on its side is the myth of the efficient market place.

This myth says that if a better way of computing existed, we would already have it. When we believe the myth, we deny the manipulation of the computer market by Big Tech. We ignore history -including their refusal to sell lower-priced less powerful computers until Asus forced them to in 2007 with the EEE PC. We ignore the fact that they have been telling us that computers have become less upgradeable because thin and upgradeable are not both possible, until recently when the Framework laptop revealed that as false. Most importantly, when we believe the myth, we abandon the search for better, less expensive options. When we believe that we have thin, light, completely nonupgradeable computers because they are the best products, we do not ask why we have no other options. We simply accept and buy.

Due to the lack of innovation in the computer industry, one thing we now have on our side in the real computer game is that Big Tech is being forced to resort to more transparently false justifications for why we need to upgrade.

For example, to get us to buy a new computer in order to be able to switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Microsoft stated publicly that Windows 11 would simply not run on a computer without a TPM 2.0 chip and an eighth generation or newer CPU. Most consumers did not immediately question the veracity of this claim, likely due to their lack of understanding of technology. But eventually the truth leaked out to anyone who was paying attention, and Microsoft was forced to backpedal on system requirements. The truth is that Microsoft could have designed Windows 11 to run on any hardware it wanted, even on a fifteen-year-old computer. When you create software, you can make it do virtually whatever you want and run on virtually any computing platform you want. To say that your software "CAN'T" run on a fifteen-year-old computer is to say that you are incapable of making it do that - which is not true! The truth is that you just don't want to make it to do that.

So, how can consumers win the real computer game?

The answer is simple in principle but more difficult in practice. The winning strategy is to become knowledgeable about computer hardware and software and better understand the technology found in a typical computer. One way to do this is to read basic literature that explains how today's computers work. Another is to experiment with different computers, including those with non-Windows, non-Mac, and non-iOS software. Try Linux. Try Free Office. Even trying older versions of Windows like Windows XP can be an eye-opening experience when you have been used to waiting forever for software to load, documents to open, and computers to boot. Also experiment with older computers. Try surfing the Internet on a computer with efficient software and a Core 2 Duo CPU from 2007. Buy an old desktop or laptop on EBay for $50. Take it apart and put it back together again. See how much you can improve its performance by upgrading its components. Remember, Big Tech will never tell you that their consumer-grade hardware is unreliable or that their software is buggy and unnecessarily bloated and slow. In order to understand that, you must first experience hardware that is reliable and software that is written by developers who actually care about the user's experience. Once you have obtained the knowledge, use it to buy only reliable computer hardware and efficient bug-free software. Buy only what you actually need. And buy it for only the money you actually need to pay.