| Amazon
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I'm neither advocate nor foe of Amazon. They are a company, that's doing their best to adapt to changing market demands. Some things they do, like offering me better selection at lower prices, is great. Other things they do, like censorship or partisan politics, is annoying. A company isn't made up of any one act or person, but the aggregate of all of them. This article is a list of different Amazon related topics/articles that touch on the Amazon Gestalt. While I have individual opinions on individual acts, I'm perfectly fine leaving it to readers to make up their own minds on those micro-acts, or the macro-organization and personalities.
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| Apple
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A list of various articles and topics of discussion around Apple. Since they're a secretive company, I tend to avoid opining on a lot of things about them, out of respect for their desire and right to control their own messaging. So I tend to only focus on the trivial for a reason.
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| Belkin
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Belkin International, is the parent company for Belkin, Linksys and Wemo: American manufacturers of consumer electronics that specializes in connectivity devices including routers, iPod and iPhone accessories, mobile computing accessories, surge protectors, network switches, hubs, (USB and computer network) cables, KVM switches, racks and enclosures, and other peripherals.
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| Facebook
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Facebook is 3 things: bad interface, bad management, and biased policies. I want a social network that gives me control of what I see and share -- both to my friends and to advertisers. I realize they need to make a buck, and my information is their product, but the point is you can still give users the illusions of control. But Zuckerberg seems to have falling into the egocentric pit that many young billionaires do, they think because they timed things well, and worked hard, and got lucky that they're smarter than everyone else. This makes them arrogant, less mature, and slower to grow than the average human: Dunning-Kruger, inflated by being surrounded by yes-men.
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| Google
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In 1995, two 20-something Ph.D. students from Stanford were looking for something to do their dissertations on, and decided that they should focus on a Web crawler and indexer research. Once they found funding and a revenue stream based on advertising, they became what's known in the Valley as a Unicorn: a multi-billion dollar company. And their saga from College Dormitory Culture to Corporate Cult began. Unfortunately, explosively rapid successes skip normal growth and maturing processes in corporations, and can create cults (or at least cult-like behavior). There's a line between corporate culture and conformity to the corporate line or expulsion, and that line seems to often get crossed at the Googleplex, without any of the normal checks and balances that might apply at a more moderate corporation.
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| Nextdoor
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Nextdoor is a Social Platform, that felt that removing anonymity, keeping it local, and better policing/community standards would make a different type of Social Media platform. While the created might have been well intentioned leftist activists, they failed to understand that wokescolds will ruin everything you give them a voice in. So it has all the maturity and depth of a Twitter, wrapped in false civility and double standards of leftist PC thought-police, moderating anything.
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| Open Offices
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A bunch of startups didn't have money to create usable facilities, and they were often hiring students who didn't know better (about what private space was) and worked out of coffee shops, so they created "Open Offices". Planners who failed at life decided that if Google/Facebook/etc. succeeded in spite of a horrendously distracted working environment, then everyone should suffer -- and Corporate America (especially Tech) started shifting to Open Office Floorplans; to the annoyance of tech workers everywhere. This was sold as "more collaborative", but there's no worker with a triple digit IQ that actually buys that, and there have been multiple studies that bear out the skepticism: workers get more quiet to keep from disturbing others (and hide away in meeting rooms or with headphones to create faux privacy). But the one-size-fits-all is attractive to the small-of-mind, paired up with the financial folks that could increase population density, without fixing facilities for parking, loading/unloading or eating. And the results have been productivity killing, increased employee friction, increased illness/sick-time, less face-to-face interaction, and more start working from home or as remote as can get away with. This will go down as proof that companies that ignore management fads operate much better than those that follow them.
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| Quark
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Quark is a company that helped revolutionize Desktop publishing. But they should be a verb for how to fuck-up your business. They went from 95% market share in desktop publishing (thought the 1980's and 1990), to 25 percent within a few years after Adobe InDesign was released. And InDesign was released with fewer features, not to mention conversion costs. Why would 3 out of 4 customers pay money and time to convert? The answer is simple: they outsources their development to India, had some of the worst support in the industry, had the most annoying copy-protection (DRM / Digital Rights Management) that made it expensive/annoying to use/maintain/upgrade their programs -- and they basically pissed their customers off, that they would have paid more to get less, just to get out from under their thumb.
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| Slack
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Slack is an internal messaging/communication tool (1:1 and many:many) that gives users the impression that their communications/channels are private, but the truth is that are able to be monitored by IT/managers/corporate eyes. In any corporate culture that allows "open discussions", it often allows for herd think and the problems with social media: especially in leftist/snowflake culture.
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| Twitter
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Twitter is an enemy of free speech and tolerance. Examples include them shadow banning conservatives (and admitting it, on-tape), some of their employees getting excited about violating their members privacy (assuming those members are conservatives/Trump), and how they suppressed anti-Hillary tweets during the election. That's scarily Orwellian. It's still their company and they get to be as dicky as they want to be with it (within the bounds of the law). But I'm going to point out their moral terpitude just so that consumers can make an informed choice -- not as any call to action (legal, governmental or otherwise).
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| Wink
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Wink is an American brand of software and hardware products that does smart home devices. During the middle of a COVID pandemic they decided to shift from paid to subscription only model with 7 days notice to customers -- meaning if customers don't pay the extortion then their products become useless. While they were going to piss off users either way, the way they handled was guaranteed to cause maximum irritation and alienation
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| YouTube
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YouTube (a division of Google) has a specially abusive place when it comes to the world of selective censorship - that only seems to apply to truths liberals hate to hear.
- PragerU's was suppressed/censored (silently), with no evidence offered that anything they have said it wrong, untrue, or racist. They do expose misleading beliefs of the far left, so that appears reasonable to block or punish them.
- YouTube went on a crusade against guns, first you couldn't sell guns, then promote guns, and so on. They terminated gun parts channels, like Brownells. They're inventing laws and changing terms that are against the spirit of our constitution.
- As part of an NYT Expose by Project Veritas (James O'keefe), they caught the NYT editor Nick Dudich explaining how he was using friendships and coordination with YouTube (Earnest Pettie) to manipulate social media to intentionally influence the news. YouTube was being a tool of evil, to work against a free election.
Every company has a right to decide who they support or not. But the problem is Google/YouTube PRETENDS to be an open platform (and community service). Yet, they're not doing what they advertise. If they openly admitted in their policies that they're a left-of-center advocacy site that will censor center/right positions at will, then at least that would be honest.
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