It's short sighted of a special kind, even.

2-3 decades ago, it was car manufacturing. Every car maker by then knew that the Chinese would steal the tech. There's a famous example of a Mercedes Benz factory making busses which for the first year or two sold like hot cakes. Then demand suddenly vanished. Research found that the chinese joint venture partner (you had to joint venture in those days, not sure about now) had copied the entire factory, brick by brick, one city away. An exact copy making the exact same busses, just without Mercedes Benz in the loop. And, of course, slightly cheaper.

Everyone knew that.

And yet everyone went to China. They figured that it was still profitable to accept that risk.

Of course, the fact that CEOs these days change every few years and get a severance package large enough that they can immediately retire doesn't exactly make them long-term thinkers.

Heck, stop getting any food that is available locally. It's insane that I can buy some food that was grown in South America, shipped to Asia for processing and packaging and then shipped to Europe for less than the same food grown in Europe.

There's quite a bit of utter insanity there.

Yes, but this cuts both ways. These days, a LOT of essential day-by-day supplies are manufactured in China. If China and the G7 stopped all trade tomorrow, the damage to the G7 would be bigger and more immediate than that on China.

True. Germany is learning that lesson now that cheap energy from Russia is no longer available and its export business can't compete anymore.

Oh, you want profit? This is a surveillance spyware wrapper around the entire MacOS user experience - so if you thought Microsoft's Copilot Recall was invasive monitoring, you haven't seen anything yet.

If Apple won't monetize a user panopticon and partner with governments to do it, OpenAI will be right there, to take the cash.

That way you'll *really* get off line, what with you recording it for posterity!

Last I knew they were moving to all web-apps with web-terminals for everybody.

The billionaires want to kill capitalism. They are sick and fucking tired of being dependent on us filthy consumers.

The plan seems to be to return to an economic system like we had before merchants existed. Not barter. But where the king owns everything and everything belongs to The King.

The difference is these new Kings will have robots and automation so they won't even need the peasants.

I don't think anyone ever imagined that it would be the billionaire class that destroyed capitalism but here we are.

Honestly at that point everything is going to be so fucking pear-shaped it won't matter.

He's a member of the ruling class. Once we get to the point where the ruling class is killing each other then you're at the point Russia's at where you have a very tiny number of people living okay a very very very tiny number of people living like gods and then 99% of the population or more is living in horrifying poverty.

Yes. And if Trump's massive abuse of that power is not enough, nothing will be.

Yes. Welcome to the newest "shithole" country.

In some parts of Europe, that would mean executives getting punished personally if caught.

Indeed. Although that "Office stack" already exists (LibreOffice) and who needs Exchange to begin with?

At the moment all that is keeping MS alive is momentum. But their usability and security are getting worse and, at least in Europe, o365 is actually not legal to use for privacy-relevant data in many cases. The legal system has just not yet caught up with many of these uses.

Yep. And anybody is fucked if their servers go down or their cloud gets hacked again.

I know of one pretty large bank that cannot move to o365, because that would be illegal. (Data has to stay under their control....)
Maybe they will go LibreOffice, nothing really to prevent them from that.