- It's week four of my tech blockade.
So far I've blocked Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
This week is Microsoft which honestly
I think is gonna be a breeze.
I kind of have to admit I almost left
Microsoft out of my blocking experiment.
They're a huge company
but I'm just not reliant on their services
like I am with the other companies.
And Microsoft's days as a tech supervillain
are pretty much a thing of the past
since the 1990s when attorneys general from 20 states
and the U.S. Department of Justice
assembled like Voltron
to take the tech company down
for violating Antitrust Law.
Last August Microsoft threatened
to pull its hosting services from Gab
over antisemitic content,
and then in November Microsoft surpassed Apple
as the most valuable company in the world, briefly.
And that made me realize that Microsoft is indeed a giant
deserving of inclusion in my experiment.
I couldn't think offhand of any
Microsoft services I actually use.
I last had an Outlook account
for corporate email five years ago.
Now I'm all Gmail.
I use Google Docs and Spreadsheets
instead of Word and Excel,
and I don't have an Xbox.
- Oh no.
- Microsoft also owns LinkedIn
which is admittedly an invaluable reporting tool,
but I figured I could live without it for a week or two.
I planned to take Microsoft out of my life
the same way I had removed the tech giants that preceded it,
by sending my traffic through a VPN
that blocks all IP addresses
controlled by the Redmond giant.
Just a couple of hours into the week,
I ran into my first hiccup.
I was scheduled to talk
to some engineering students
via Skype which Microsoft owns.
I also use Skype for weekly catch-ups with Dhruv,
the technologist who built my blocker for this experiment.
Thankfully alternatives like Zoom and appear.in exist.
Thanks for having me here to talk to you guys.
My next unexpected encounter with Microsoft
happened on the second day of the block
when I got into my long-term rental car, a 2015 Ford Fusion,
and looked down to see the company's four-square logo:
Sync, powered by Microsoft.
I quickly DuckDuckGo'd to figure out what exactly Sync was,
and discovered that it's part of the entertainment
and navigation system.
Apparently this car was one of the last models
to have Sync powered by Microsoft.
There may have been Microsoft things
I was using without realizing.
- I was getting a MetroCard.
And like there was an error message up on one of them
and I recognized it as like a Windows error message.
I had probably been using that for the whole week.
And then I asked the lady who I bought my coffee from
if the POS system she rang me up on
was Microsoft or was Windows,
and she was like, "Yeah, this is Windows.
Every time I turn it on, there's a big Windows logo."
- So it looks like unless there's a little iPad there
that you're paying with,
their point of service machine is probably Microsoft.
I wasn't able to block it
because they're not working
for the most part directly with me.
- Yeah, it's not like choices
that you could individually make
that would stop Microsoft from getting your data.
It's like, just by virtue of being in a city,
you're like using, I don't know, walking around,
you're encompassed into their software.
- I discovered that part of the reason
Microsoft is still such a valuable company
is because it mainly supplies technology to businesses.
And Microsoft with Azure is the second largest provider
of cloud services after Amazon's AWS.
The ban itself didn't take much of a toll on my daily life
but my devices did make a fair amount of attempts
to contact Microsoft servers,
whether directly as when I tried to check
the junk email account I keep on Hotmail for shopping,
or indirectly when a site I wanted was hosted on Azure.
Altogether my devices tried to talk
to Microsoft servers 15,000 times
or as often as they tried to talk to Facebook
when I was blocking that tech giant.
I wonder if this is the kind of company
Microsoft was fated to become
regardless of the Antitrust investigation in the 90s.
Or maybe if the government hadn't intervened back then,
we'd all be using Micro Mail and serving Micro Book
and posting our photos to Microgram,
and Binging our latest health concern.
Microsoft was the most popular
operating system by far 30 years ago.
And the government worried
it was going to dominate
the newly emerging internet as well,
crushing would-be competitors
before their businesses could develop.
The test case was Netscape
which was selling a popular internet browser
called Navigator for $50.
Microsoft undercut it
by offering Internet Explorer for free
and insisting computer makers include it
along with Microsoft's operating system.
Originally the government wanted to break Microsoft up
but it settled for Microsoft's promise
to not exclude competitors from new computers.
Netscape eventually made Navigator free as well,
laying the groundwork for an internet
where almost everything is free,
and monetized instead via our attention and our data.
Microsoft itself was a beneficiary
of an Antitrust against IBM years earlier.
The concessions it made in the 90s
opened the door for the rise of new companies.
So here is the big question,
if I can survive today without Microsoft
because of the government's Antitrust crackdown in the 90s,
what should the government do today
about the tech behemoths I can't live without?
Next time, Apple.