[loudmax]

I'm not sure where you get the impression that these three companies don't advertise much.

In any case, nobody should have to patronize a company if they don't want to, whatever their motivation. The problem with the big tech companies is that one so frequently doesn't have a choice. I may not want to buy from MS, but some bit of hardware I'd like to use only supports Windows drivers and some bit of paperwork I need to fill out is distributed as a Word doc whose formatting doesn't render correctly outside of MS Office.

In all fairness, one can avoid Walmart and McDonalds if one wants to, but Google and Facebook are as hard to avoid as Microsoft.

[misterprime]

How is Facebook hard to avoid?

[loudmax]

Not hard until you want to become involved in an organization that happens to use Facebook as their primary platform for broadcasting information. Or maybe you really would like to see photos of your newborn niece or nephew. Depends on your situation.

[misterprime]

The baby pictures are an issue. I had to make it clear that if they didn't text or e-mail me the photos, I would miss them. Also that I didn't want to miss them, but I was OK with it. Finally, I asked them to also add them to a Google Photos shared album for the family.

It's worked out well enough. Eliminating Google sounds too painful to me, so I'm glad my family agreed to share their photos on Google's platform for me.