Which tech giant would you give up first?
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Explain your vote? (Score:2)
Personally, I put in Alphabet because my company provides it's tools as Chrome Extensions. If Alphabet/Google went away I'd have a BIG problem in how to run my business/make money to live.
Why did other people vote - As I write this, it's interesting to see that Amazon has ZERO votes.
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't the poll asking the opposite question? I voted Facebook. It adds nothing to my day to day life apart from anecdote listicles that I could do without.
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I agree - Facebook is pretty useless. Nothing of real value there, all the members of Facebook is the goods Facebook sells.
I once was a customer at Amazon, but it was a long time ago so it comes in as a good second. Google at least provides some value. Microsoft and Apple is questionable if they provide value or if they cost more in privacy than what they return in value.
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:4, Insightful)
I once was a customer at Amazon, but it was a long time ago so it comes in as a good second
Amazon's AWS servers and services may power a lot of what we depend on without us knowing about it.
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Amazon's AWS servers and services may power a lot of what we depend on without us knowing about it.
Exactly this. I was about to vote Amazon, but AWS is everywhere.
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is no threat to you.
**Just close your profile.**
You can't avoid Microsoft. They are the correct answer to this question.
Microsoft has never innovated, they owe their success to government contracts, and have copied their rival Apple's designs repeated. But let's focus on M$'s origin, they were the OS that IBM put on all the desktop PC's the government ordered...
Microsoft: Your tax dollars at work.
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Microsoft has never innovated, they owe their success to government contracts, and have copied their rival Apple's designs repeated. But let's focus on M$'s origin, they were the OS that IBM put on all the desktop PC's the government ordered...
Actually, has anyone ever seen an exhaustive list of how many technology standards went from Apple to Microsoft vs. vice-versa? My memory is foggy on the subject, but I seem to recall that both USB and PCI technologies were on PCs long before Macs. And certainly x86 / x64 processors were.
The basic architecture of Windows' windows originates in IBM's 1987 Common User Architecture (SAA/CUA) specs, but I don't know how much of that originated from Apple products.
What am I missing? Which ones went from Apple t
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For starters, decades of stealing design, especially with their OS. Apple makes an innovative OS that takes advantage of new computing advancements, M$'s next functional version has those same design factors.
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Remember Vista, which was basically a one on one copy of OSX 10.4?
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The entire desktop metaphor? The concept of windows?
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:2)
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Nobody from PC-land new what a USB port was when the iMac came out, and I remember everyone ref
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Ok, well thank you for the clarification, as far as it goes.
What I am really looking for is a sort of score card, showing which major bits came from Apple, Microsoft, or someone else entirely (such as, per your explanation, USB and PCI). Globaljustin mentions Apple leading design innovation, which as far as I'm concerned goes without saying, but is somewhat beside the point. My interest is more in technology -- for example, after all the TRS-80s, PETs, DesqView, Windows on DOS, and OS/2, I remember being de
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That's bullshit, I've been working in the industry in "PC-land" since the early 90's and all the PCs we worked on were being released with USB ports by around '98, and everybody in the industry knew exactly what it was and why it would be beneficial and that it was going to replace the older port types (e.g. much higher speeds, a common peripheral interface etc.), nobody thought it was some "weird" thing, and certainly nobody thought of it as an Apple thing at all, because Apple were virtually-dead-nobodies
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To be fair to MS they are not a hardware company. If there was demand from consumer and business then support would follow for the most part. Intel led lots of things come the 90s but before then everyone just followed big blue. It's not like one tech company exists in a vacuum, they all borrow and build on each others ideas. That there was some form of standardisation has meant that development happened relatively rapidly. It's entirely possible that 'better' designs were waylaid by better marketing but su
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Actually, now that you mention it, I recall that they hired the guy or the team that wrote VAX VMS:
http://windowsitpro.com/window... [windowsitpro.com]
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:2)
Your comment has so many incorrect points that I'm not sure where to begin. But the fact that MS didn't start as an OS company is probably the biggest. MS started as a developer tools and language provider for various hardware. Google or BING "Altair Basic".
Your problem isn't what you don't know, the problem is how much you know ... that isn't so.
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Indeed, the BASIC interpreter on the Commodore 64 was written by MS.
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You can't avoid Microsoft.
Speak for yourself.
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Do you really never get .doc[x] files?
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> Facebook is no threat to you.
That wasn't the question. I have never used facebook. So I've already given up on them. So that's the tech giant I'm giving up on first.
The question was NOT: "Which tech giant do you think is most threatening?"
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My view is that they are no longer the biggest threat to freedom and progress in technology, and we need to remain vigilant to the other emerging threats of which I believe Facebook an
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:2)
Doesn't that make them the last one you could give up?
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Re:Explain your vote? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it was asking which tech giant you would give up *first*. I voted Microsoft. I could easily give up Facebook since I barely use it for anything at all (I have an account mainly so some family members can be "friends" with me, but I never post anything), and I could even more easily give up Apple because I'm not a customer of theirs at all. I do, however, use MS-ware at work because, like most workplaces, most of their IT is Microsoft-based. However, I'd give it up happily, assuming this means that everyone gives it up or is forced to abandon it, because the world would be better off without Microsoft. I'd be happy as a clam if everyone was suddenly forced to migrate away from Windows and I didn't have to use it at work any more.
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I'd be happy as a clam if everyone was suddenly forced to migrate away from Windows and I didn't have to use it at work any more.
How happy are clams?
Re:Explain your vote? (Score:4, Funny)
Their happiness "goes to 11."
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I'd be happy as a clam if everyone was suddenly forced to migrate away from Windows.
Microsoft keeps trying to force me away. With each change, their stuff is less a "productivity platform" and more a "distraction platform."
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Hopefully this ransomware attack helps us with that.
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It won't. I've been watching all kinds of attacks happen against Windows for a couple decades now, and it hasn't changed anything. I remember going to work once about 16 years ago at a major (top 10) tech company and seeing notices on the doors warning us not to open some email. Of course, it was something that only affected Outlook on Windows, but no one's given up Outlook yet, or Windows, in the business world.
The way I see it, the only way businesses are going to give up Windows is because they're act
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:1)
The question is eight words long, and you didn't even read it.
Re: Explain your vote? (Score:1)
Not reading is appropriate for /. Lots of ADH. .. look a squirrel...
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Which tech giant would you give up first?
How does that not make sense?
Of the five choices, which one could you live without?
How hard is that to comprehend... does your brain not parse information properly?
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I voted Amazon by mistake. The title of the article is "Slashdot Asks: Which Tech Giant You Can't Live Without?" (never mind the grammatical mistake of misplacing "can't"), so without looking at the poll, I voted for the one I actually couldn't live without. And then realized the poll actually asks the opposite: "Which tech giant would you give up first?" A simple inversion of the question may have invalidated the results.
I can't live without Amazon because It save me so much time when I'm shopping for e
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Plus lots and lots of counterfeit products! What's not to like?
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Like what? Have you received products that were counterfeit? I'm genuinely interested, since I pretty much do the bulk of my shopping (except groceries) from Amazon. Would my chances of receiving a counterfeit product be more if I bought from Amazon as opposed to some other web site?
I looked through my Amazon order history, going back 6 months. About half of the crap I buy is made in China anyways. The other half, some of would be hard to pass counterfeit products on: Dell monitor, rental books, Eco Sp
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/w... [forbes.com]
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08... [cnbc.com]
Yeah, your Delphi ignition coils are probably a high-risk item I'm guessing; there's a lot of counterfeit auto parts out there. The brake pads too if they're some kind of name brand. You don't know who's really selling you these items, despite what Amazon claims, because they comingle the inventory of different sellers. So USA Seller A with genuine Delphi coils might ship them to Warehouse A for FBA, while Chinese seller B ships their coun
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I would have to work to replace the things that I enjoy from Google. So I definitely have use for Google and would not easily give them up. So not vote for Alphabet.
I find Amazon convenient. I could live without them if I had to. I would have to drive to Microcenter more often. They wouldn't be my first choice to give up.
Decades ago I w
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Hey, you know that guy everyone says is an evil drug dealer? He gave me a free sample! So he's not utterly evil!
Hey, you know those Russian billionaires who let me build a hotel in . . .
Oh, nevermind.
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So you voted to give up the one company upon which your business depends? That makes a lot of sense.
If others were as easily confused about the meaning of the question as you were, this poll has absolutely zero significance whatsoever.
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I chose Apple because I'm a cheater...I never use any Apple products and their existence provides negative value to me!
I even watch a video on Facebook once in a while, although Youtube could do that just as well.
Which is the most cancerous and EVIL company? (Score:3)
I already gave up Amazon (as of 15 years ago) and would gladly give up EVERY one of them. They've all proven how cancerous and EVIL they are, though it's still a bit iffy for Facebook because it isn't clear how they are profiting from the evil they support. Facebook might be in the category of "really useful idiot machine" and the heart of Facebook itself might still be in a fairly non-evil place.
I think the root of the problem is that the rules of the game have been corrupted. The most cheaply bribed polit
Microsoft for me (Score:2)
As I don't use Google or Facebork and only go to Amazon on the odd chance that they might have something worth buying, MS comes before Apple.
Confusing (Score:2)
This is confusing with the poll asking which company we'd give up first, and the frontpage post asking which one we can't live without...
(https://ask.slashdot.org/story/17/05/10/1516251/slashdot-asks-which-tech-giant-you-cant-live-without)
Personally I can give them all up except Amazon (too convenient for my book-buying habit). There's already no Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft in my life.
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Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yea, I didn't really want to put Apple. But Apple is the one I've already given up, so it's not really hypothetical.
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Do any of them DO something for you? (Score:2)
Facebook does nothing for us. It simply promoted IRC to the masses and spread the generally toxic expositions that anonymity used to provide to a general sounding board where so many people share idiotic click bait, that it has become impossible for the sheeple to decipher truth from reality. Everything from flipping a bottle and OMG it landed upright to the latest BS "news" that is simply some moronic editorial is enabled by Facebook. Working with them as a company (not for them, but as a "partner") is an
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Look at it differently...
Amazon gives us devs Amazon Web Services, which many people based entire companies and products on (look at Dropbox, they were based on AWS until a few years ago, pushing tens of millions of users of their service through AWS based services).
Facebook gives us devs a lot of tools - React, GraphQL, many many infrastructure tools etc. Facebook has released a lot of stuff over the years.
Google is the most obvious one, given its search engine and cloud platform, but it also gives us dev
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Apple is the odd one out here - it gives us LLVM
Stop misleading on behalf of Apple Corp. LLVM was created long before there was any association with Apple. LLVM is open source; it will probably exist longer than Apple. One or two lead developers get their salary from Apple, but the project would hardly disappear if they decided to leave Apple's employ (or even the project).
Kudos though on your ability to "work" open source tools/platforms outside of the Apple environment.
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Apple does drive LLVM development however, its certainly gained more traction under their stewardship than it did before...
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Amazon gives us devs Amazon Web Services, which many people based entire companies and products on
And I seriously wish that they'd stop. I continue to try to avoid using products and services that rely on AWS, but it's becoming impossible, and often impossible to even detect if AWS is in use.
If Facebook wasn't on the list, I'd vote for Amazon just to express my wish that AWS became nonexistent.
Apple for sure (Score:1)
Apple makes different versions of what these other companies do. It's easily replaceable, even if arguably their version is better (I don't really use them, but I'm willing to accept that).
Facebook is my address book and how I keep in touch with family.
Google is my personal and company email, and searching is pretty important too
Microsoft is replaceable, probably more so than facebook, but it's pretty entrenched, it'd be a painful transition.
Aside from all the times I touch AWS (more than anything Azure I a
Never used Facebook... (Score:2)
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Microsoft has been dead to me for decades now...
Google offers little more than a browser for me...
Apple has been on autopilot for a few years now...
Between Amazon Web Services Lock-in and pathetic UX, it's gotta be them.
Nobody else is even relevant to me.
I think you misread the question. Which one would you give up first, not which one do you want to keep.
Facebook indispensible? (Score:2)
OTOH, Facebook mostly wastes my time. While I would miss it, I wouldn't miss it much and I always like a bit more free time. I should say that I don't access Facebook daily. Maybe every two days so I don't miss a Bloom County. Hmm. Maybe Bloom County should move Microsoft back to last place. Or, maybe Apple as I don't
Facebook (Score:2)
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Facebook (Score:2)
I could have put Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon since I rarely if ever use their products. But I settled on Facebook since I've never had an account and have never felt impacted in any way for not having an account.
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Keep only google? (Score:2)
I chose to give up Microsoft. I don't personally use Microsoft for anything and their broken mail services (when used used by others) provides me with negative function.
Really, though, I could give up the rest pretty easily.
Facebook? Yes, I use it. Can't say anything I do there is important though.
Amazon? I don't own any Amazon devices. I do buy things from Amazon but I could get them elsewhere. No big deal.
Apple? I do have an older iPad but it is mostly a toy. If Apple disappeared, the worst that w
I don't use any of them! (Score:2)
All of them (Score:1)
I already have nothing to do with Facebook or Apple. I put Facebook first, since there isn't an option to identify ones I don't use already.
I've been working on dropping all aspects of Microsoft from my personal life. I dropped MS Office 6 years, MS Outlook 2 years, and have been changing devices over to Linux over the last 3 years. I don't use any of Microsoft's cloud services. Unfortunately my job is supporting Microsoft products, but the upside is that there is always something to fix so my job is secure
Already Giving Up Apple (Score:2)
I'm already giving up on Apple. Between the utter failure that is the 2013+ Mac Pro, the lack of CUDA-enabled products, and the fact that the software I use is moving away from the platform I don't really have much choice. The only thing keeping me in as far as I am is my media library.
Don't give up Apple! (Score:3)
While I personally don't use their products, as a shareholder I think everyone (else) should buy new iDevices every year.
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Can't Apple just pay you a dividend of their pocket change, like $1 billion?
Last would be more interesting (Score:2)
Terrible poll (Score:2)
It needs' to be multiple-choice, or at least have an "all" option. Choosing one is creating a false assumption that the others *cannot* be given up.
Microsoft has been made irrelevant (Score:3)
It is said, "That which you fear the most will befall you." And I recall, in the 1990s, while I was doing work for Waggener-Edstrom (now WE Worldwide) for Microsoft, Bill Gates feared the engineers at Apple. Gates was constantly exhorting his code teams to innovate because, "The other guys are going to overtake us." He also dismissed the Internet. He said, "This is a gold rush," and "People have a gold rush mentality with respect to the Internet." I think that Gates theorized that the only people who made good money off the gold rush were the stores that sold the tools that the "rushers" needed.
So Microsoft dedicated themselves to making tools. They made Internet Exploiter, their web browser—but they ignored standards. In 1996, they purchased FrontPage from Vermeer Technologies, Incorporated and that ignored standards. They built a platform for serving web pages from their server, called IIS, which costs a lot and doesn't run very many websites. They created a server-side programming language that almost nobody uses called ASP.
They didn't reckon with the likes of Google (now Alphabet) which has replaced their office suite with apps that run on web browsers using websites that do not ignore standards. They didn't figure that "information at your fingertips" would mean the Internet, Wikipedia and the Worldwide Web.
They also didn't figure that, once everyone had a copy of Microsoft Office that worked with their operating system on a Mac or PC—or had a tool that replaced that function (on Unix or Linux)—sales of Office would decrease.
Microsoft didn't make hardware. They saw making hardware as something that would compete with the PC makers they sold their operating system to and they did not want to do that. But they also did not create appliances, save the Microsoft Mouse. Apple created an appliance model with what they learned from building computers and, today, they are the largest company worldwide with a market capitalization of $800 Billion. Not bad for selling phones!
I blame Steve Ballmer. While Gates was running Microsoft, he made few mistakes. The stock price doubled every year. Under Ballmer, Microsoft stagnated and grew complacent. I don't think that anyone really needs them any more.
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I knew someone was going to tell me that IE was invented when there were no standards. I disagree.
In 1994, the W3 Consortium was formally established with support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in Europe, DARPA, and the European Commission, with a mandate to oversee development of common web protocols and promote web interoperability. Cite: Living Internet [livinginternet.com]
Microsoft originally released Internet Explorer 1.0 in Augu
Trick question (Score:2)
Of the other 3, I use them everyday, both personally and professionally (Well, not Amazon, for work.)
I already have (Score:2)
I've given up all of them. Well, nearly. Technically I still use windows simply because it's been twenty years of writing code in ultraedit, and changing seems stupid. But I'm writing linux code anyway, so the switch would be easy.
The order in which I would destroy: (Score:2)
Facebook, easy (Score:2)
Amazon (Score:2)
i would vote AT&T but Microsoft is just as bad (Score:2)
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Alphabet! (Score:2)
Since I don't use it. Ha! Facebook would be next.
I don't use Apple (Score:2)
In a nutshell, I can easily live without Apple as I use absolutely none of their products. I can easily live without Facebook. Amazon is useful but I can once again easily live without it. I need Microsoft Office for work, however if it disappeared it would be easy enough to switch to another Office suite with only a little pain. I use Google all day every day for my smartphone, gmail, calander, maps and other services. The integration provided is really useful.
1st? Google/Facebook/Apple bc I don't use them. (Score:2)
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So you have a Microsoft smartphone too?
Don't use three out of the five (Score:1)
So had to vote for Amazon since everything it supplies I can get elsewhere.
Which tech giant would you give up first? (Score:2, Interesting)
I really can't see why this question is hard for so many people to understand. Some people feel they can't include XXX in their considerations because they have never used it. That, by default then, is the one they should pick. They need to consider word 4 in the question. The people who fail to see word 8, however, are bringing ./ to a new level of not RTFM. They are not even reading the title.
As for my choice. In reverse order...
Alphabet (Google) not only have the historical plusses of expanding my
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I've already given up on two of them (Score:2)
Strange poll (Score:2)
The wording of the question promotes no useful answer. I suspect many of us voted for a company whose products we don't use, or would otherwise like to rid the world of, but aren't actually relevant to our lives, and/or we may be totally ignorant about. Facebook is leading, but the meme on /. is we hate it and never use it.
The question should probably be, which company whose products you use, would you like to be rid of.
Google I would miss bei a little ... (Score:2)
... but even that doesn't matter too much. As a computer expert and FOSS person I don't rely on the cloud or large corporations for mission critical stuff. And neither should you or anybody else, imho.
I would miss Amazon a bit too, because it is the only relyable way to get fairly priced english books in Germany that I know of.
Amazon, maybe? (Score:2)
Facebook, as I did a while back. (Score:2)
...although, saying that sort of feels like saying, "I don't have a TV" did back in the 90's; and I'm not young, nor smug, enough to enjoy it anymore.
Apple would be a second, but I'm stuck with them due to work.
Amazon, I love. Two delivery is a god send for someone with a seizure disorder and a plethora of neurosis, Microsoft doesn't offend me as much as they used to and Google (again, job wise isn't possible to avoid) is something I'm stuck with.
But, yeah... social media annoys the living crap out of me.
Facebook and Microsoft (Score:2)
All of the above, Katie (Score:2)
Says someone who runs Linux at work and at home. And who tends to buy from smaller vendors.
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Pretty obviously then, your choice is Facebook as you found it so easy to give up you already have or perhaps never even started it..
The question did not ask when do you intend... It asked which would...
That is the difference between a question of intent and a hypothetical one.