Large corporations have zero empathy for competition.

What will their quarterly report say? Think of the stockholders. (/s)

By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.

Whenever I see a story of "some guy who relies on <big tech account> working loses access to it and suddenly can't do anything anymore" I think "this can never happen to me". Which means there's a whole category of problems you're suddenly never going to see. It also means you're less naive. So just don't vendor-lock yourself in. Don't put a log-in for an account which you don't control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.

On top of that, you'll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I'm just saying, if you don't even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you'll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.

I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it's probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn't vendor-lock yourself in.

Yep, I don't remember the exact phrasing, but in these situations, I assume incompetence before I assume evil intent.

Maybe it is intentional but the incompetence is in how obvious they are.

Hell that's a compliment.

I'm not as in the loop these days - are some Linux pundits still trying the "maybe MS isn't as bad as they used to be" line or have we learned again now?

Who in their right mind uses hotmail?

What, Microsoft? The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them? Microsoft the convicted monopoly?

Noooooo! It can't be! They're so . . . uh . . . ubiquitous.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetentance

Is the saying, but it's definitely not always true.

Microsoft + GitHub = if you're using it still W T F are you thinking!!!

Cries in NixOS

To much of a power use to use LibreOffice exclusively, but it is amazing for what it is and Microsoft is absolute shit

No real reason to be using a hotmail account in this day and age, even less so if you're a developer of a direct competitor for Microsoft.

It's not even that. It's way smaller potatoes down in the org chart.

People always say "why would large company do this" and the answer is almost always that guy 7 or 8 rows down the org chart needs this to get their bonus this year and that point gets distilled into 1 bullet in a power point presentation that is summarized by chatgpt.

It's more like some of the best evil can be hidden behind incompetence for quite a while

I mean, the phrase is for associates and random people you run into for one specific interaction

Basically:

Give em the benefit of doubt

It doesn't mean if your neighbor kicks you in the balls everyone morning, you still try to shake his hand tomorrow.

I have this exact same thought. I see things like this and I'm like, God, I'm glad I don't have any of that shit.

Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.

Lets be real here. They'd do it no matter who's in charge.

Eh, that's the problem with email - it's much harder to change and migrate, because you can't guarantee others will use your new email, much less find out who somehow still has the old email to send messages to and expects a reply from.

This is an argument for having your own domain for emails. There is an annual cost but at least your address isn't locked to a specific provider sokcd you can change some DNS settings to point at a different mail server.