[justinclift]

Alternatively, that's 400,000 working in businesses that actually contribute to the world, and likely plenty of new start-ups as well.

The "in one day" thing would likely suck for the unprepared ones though. :/

[thebytefairy]

Peak HN, when we want to pretend that Google and Microsoft provide nothing useful to the world.

[justinclift]

Each of those companies does indeed seem to be a net negative.

[saagarjha]

That’s not quite what the comment you were responding to said.

[justinclift]

Well, they weren't responding in good faith to what I said so DILLIGAF. ;)

[dzamo_norton]

It would take excruciating gymnastics to justify a claim like this. And I'm not a fan of either entity.

[justinclift]

Well, what are the positives they bring to the world?

[achenet]

giving people tools like Word/Docs, Excel/Sheets, etc that they can use to express themselves and calculate things? Providing email for people? Giving people "it just works" (albeit not as well as Apple's stuff) operating systems (Windows/ChromeOS/Android) that they can use without having to deal with the complications of getting Linux working (although you could argue in recent days Ubuntu does this as well)? VS Code? Creating widely used programming languages (C#, TypeScript, Golang, Dart)? Paying people to work on open source projects? Google search, which, while far from perfect, does still enable people across the world to easily access information that is useful to them?

[justinclift]

k. And you feel those things benefit the world more than the negatives yeah?