1.<\/p>\n
Tuesday, 7:42 a.m. Dave Kowalski, 51, regional claims manager, two monitors, a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST GOLFER. He presses the power button and Windows tells him it has an update to finish. The bar crawls. He drinks his coffee and watches the bar. Nine minutes.<\/p>\n
The desktop returns and something has changed. He clicks a PDF and Edge opens it. He set Acrobat as his PDF handler in March. He set it again in May. Now it is August and Edge holds the file open like a dog that has fetched the wrong stick and expects praise.<\/p>\n
A pane slides in from the right. Make Edge your default browser and browse with confidence. There is a large blue button that says YES and a small gray link that says Maybe later. There is no button that says no.<\/p>\n
“There’s no ‘no,'” Dave says to the monitor.<\/p>\n
Marcus from the next cubicle leans back. “There’s never a no. ‘Maybe later’ means ask me again Thursday.”<\/p>\n
Dave opens Settings. He types “default” in the search box. He assigns Chrome to HTTP, to HTTPS, to .html, to .htm, to .pdf, one at a time, because Windows treats each as a separate act of rebellion requiring its own paperwork. He clicks a link in an email from his boss. It opens in Edge. Links from Outlook route through Microsoft’s own resolver and Microsoft’s resolver has one opinion.<\/p>\n
He puts his forehead in his hand. On the taskbar, a widget he never installed tells him the weather in a city he does not live in, and beneath it, a headline: You Won’t Believe What This Child Star Looks Like Now.<\/p>\n
2.<\/p>\n
Same building, ninth floor, 11:15 a.m. Renata Voss, marketing, has a proof due at noon. The client wants one comma moved. One comma. She double-clicks the PDF.<\/p>\n
Acrobat launches. First, a splash screen. Then a panel unfurls along the right side of the document: AI ASSISTANT. Would she like a summary of this document? She would not. She knows what the document says. She wrote the document.<\/p>\n
She hunts for the X. The X is small and pale gray on lighter gray, designed by someone whose bonus depends on her failing to find it. She closes the panel. She scrolls to the comma. A toast notification blooms in the corner of her screen: Creative Cloud has updates available.<\/p>\n
“I know,” she says. “You told me yesterday. You told me this morning.”<\/p>\n
She dismisses it. She selects the comma. A dialog box appears in the center of the document, on top of the comma: Try Acrobat’s new editing experience. Two buttons. TRY IT NOW. Remind me later.<\/p>\n
“There’s no no,” she says, and Dave Kowalski, two floors down, feels a chill he cannot explain.<\/p>\n
She pays $59.99 a month for this. The invoice arrives on the third of every month with the reliability of tides. In exchange she receives the software, plus a daily regimen of advertisements for the software she already bought, delivered inside the software, while she uses the software. She moved the comma at 11:31. The task took sixteen minutes, of which the comma took four seconds.<\/p>\n
3.<\/p>\n
Conference room B, a mid-size logistics company in Ohio. Three visitors in good suits sit on one side of the table. On the other side: the CFO, the IT director, and outside counsel, who was retained the day the letter arrived. The letter used the word “audit” the way a fisherman uses a lure.<\/p>\n
The lead visitor opens a laptop and turns it around. A spreadsheet. “Our review indicates 340 instances of Java installed across your environment.”<\/p>\n
The IT director clears his throat. “Those are runtime installs. Printers bundle it. Old inventory software bundles it. Maybe ten people use Java for anything.”<\/p>\n
“Under the current subscription model, licensing is per employee. Your headcount is 2,200.” The visitor slides a paper across the table. The number on the paper has a comma in a place the CFO has never seen a comma in connection with Java.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t choose this,” the CFO says. “It came in the box.”<\/p>\n
The visitor smiles the smile of a man whose commission is already spent. “We can discuss a resolution. Many customers find that a broader Oracle relationship resolves the compliance exposure.” He lets that sit. Buy more, and the violation evaporates. The audit was never the point. The audit is the sales call.<\/p>\n
Outside counsel writes one word on his legal pad and underlines it twice. The word is hostage.<\/p>\n
4.<\/p>\n
A kitchen table in Bakersfield, 9 p.m., February. Crystal Marsh, 26, waits tables and has a W-2, one W-2, the simplest tax situation the republic can produce. The TurboTax banner said FREE in letters the size of her thumb.<\/p>\n
Forty minutes in, she enters the $312 she earned driving for a delivery app during the slow season. The screen dissolves and reforms. Your situation requires TurboTax Deluxe. $69. Plus $59 for state.<\/p>\n
She hits the back button. The back button does not undo the upgrade. The upgrade is a ratchet. It turns one way.<\/p>\n
Her mother calls from the living room. “Everything okay?”<\/p>\n
“The free one costs a hundred and twenty-eight dollars.”<\/p>\n
There exists, somewhere on the internet, an IRS Free File version that would cost her nothing. Intuit spent years and millions in lobbying to make sure the road to it stays unlit, and the year she finally hears about it will not be this year. She types in her card number. The tax code required her to do this. A company found a way to stand between her and her own legal obligation and charge a toll, and the toll has a mascot, and the mascot is friendly.<\/p>\n
5.<\/p>\n
The IT director in scene three has a friend, Tom\u00e1s Reyes, who runs infrastructure for a hospital network in Arizona. In November the VMware renewal quote arrives. Tom\u00e1s reads it, closes the email, opens it again on the theory that he misread a decimal.<\/p>\n
He did not misread it. Broadcom completed the acquisition, killed the perpetual licenses, and bundled everything into subscriptions. The new number is nine times the old number.<\/p>\n
His boss asks the reasonable question. “Then we migrate.”<\/p>\n
“Migration is eighteen months, minimum. Every clinical system runs on this. Patient records, imaging, scheduling. We can’t have a maintenance window on the ICU.”<\/p>\n
“So we pay.”<\/p>\n
“So we pay.”<\/p>\n
Broadcom modeled this conversation before it wrote the check for the acquisition. It counted the customers who could leave and priced them as churn. It counted the customers who could not leave and priced them as ore.<\/p>\n
6.<\/p>\n
Saturday morning, a home office in a suburb of Atlanta. Denise Carter needs to print her son’s field trip permission slip. One page. Black and white.<\/p>\n
The HP inkjet on the shelf considers her request and declines. The screen on the printer says the cyan cartridge is empty. The permission slip contains no cyan. The permission slip contains no color at all. The printer does not care; its firmware holds all documents hostage to the least of its cartridges.<\/p>\n
She had Instant Ink for a while, $5.99 a month, until she noticed she printed four pages in March and canceled. The cartridges in the machine, the ones with ink still in them, the ones she had paid for through the subscription, stopped working the week the cancellation processed. HP reached into her home office over the internet and turned off her ink.<\/p>\n
She buys a third-party cartridge for eleven dollars. The printer displays a warning that non-HP supplies may harm the printer, phrased the way a man in a movie says nice house, shame if something happened to it. A firmware update, arriving quietly some future night, may brick the cartridge outright. Denise photographs the permission slip with her phone and emails it to the teacher. The printer sits on the shelf, a subscription trap wearing the costume of an appliance.<\/p>\n
7.<\/p>\n
Two last scenes, brief, because the wound is the same wound.<\/p>\n
Gary Pilcher wants two tickets to take his daughter to see a band she loves. Face value, $75 each. He selects the seats, and at checkout the total reads $211.40. Service fee, $22.50 per ticket. Order processing fee, $8.90. Facility charge, $7.75 per ticket. The transaction costs Ticketmaster a few cents of computing. There is no other store. The band’s manager booked a Live Nation venue because Live Nation owns the venues, and Live Nation owns Ticketmaster, and the tollbooth has no exit lane. Gary pays. His daughter never knows. That is the point of fathers.<\/p>\n
And in Tucson, Amy Okafor, who sells handmade jewelry online, wakes to an email from PayPal. Her account is limited pending review. The balance held: $4,806, which is her materials money and her rent money. The email does not say what triggered the review. The appeal process is a form that feeds a queue that feeds a silence. The standard hold runs 180 days. Her landlord’s grace period runs 5.<\/p>\n
8.<\/p>\n
Line the scenes up and one machine appears behind all of them. Each company found the place where the customer cannot walk: the operating system on every office computer, the file format the client demands, the database the business was built on, the tax code itself, the hypervisor under the ICU, the ink the printer will accept, the only door into the arena, the money already in the till. Then each company set a toll at that place, and the toll rises on a schedule, and the nagging, the audits, the fees, and the freezes are the toll being collected.<\/p>\n
Dave Kowalski will reset his default browser again after the October update. Renata will close the AI panel again tomorrow. The machine counts on their exhaustion. Exhaustion is the product roadmap. The one consolation, and it is real, appears in the small companies that charge money and then leave you alone, proof that the abuse was never necessary, only profitable.<\/p>\n
Notes<\/p>\n
I fight an unending war to prevent MS from forcing me to use its Edge browser and other lousy products. I do everything I can to avoid MS (with the exception of its Office Suite, I’m resigned to it). I don’t hate much in life, but I hate how MS treats me.
\nMicrosoft treats your default browser choice as a suggestion. Windows resets file associations after updates, buries the switch behind extra clicks, ignores your default when you click links from the Start menu, widgets, or Outlook, and pops up “recommendations” to give Edge another chance. Each individual nag is small. The accumulation wears you down, which is the strategy.
\nA few things that cut most of it off:
\nSet your default browser in Settings > Apps > Default apps, then set it again for individual file types (.html, .pdf, HTTP, HTTPS), because Windows treats these as separate decisions. Edge often keeps PDFs even after you switch the browser default.
\nTurn off the suggestion machinery: Settings > System > Notifications > scroll down to “Additional settings” and uncheck the options about tips, suggestions, and finishing device setup. Also Settings > Privacy & security > General, turn off all four toggles there.
\nFor links that force-open in Edge (from Start menu search, widgets, Copilot), a small free utility called MSEdgeRedirect intercepts those calls and sends them to your default browser. It’s on GitHub, widely used, and it closes the loophole Microsoft built to bypass your choice.
\nDisable Edge from launching at startup: Task Manager > Startup apps, disable anything Edge-related, and in Edge’s own settings turn off “Startup boost” and “Continue running background extensions when Edge is closed.”
\nAfter major Windows updates, expect some of this to revert and budget two minutes to check. It’s annoying that you have to maintain a defensive posture against your own operating system, but the maintenance load drops a lot once MSEdgeRedirect is in place.
\nI hate how Adobe, even when you pay for it, keep throwing pop ups and other crap at me when I have work to do!
\nAdobe treats paying customers as a marketing audience. You bought Acrobat and it still pushes AI Assistant buttons, upsell banners, “what’s new” tours, and Creative Cloud notifications while you’re mid-task. The subscription gets you the software plus the ads.
\nIn Acrobat, go to Preferences (Ctrl+K) > General and uncheck “Show me messages when I launch Adobe Acrobat” and anything about in-app messages. Under the same preferences, look for “Email Accounts” and notification options and kill those too. If the new AI Assistant panel bothers you, Preferences > Generative AI, disable it. That removes the sparkle buttons crowding your toolbar.
\nCreative Cloud desktop app is its own nag source. Open it, click your profile icon > Preferences > Notifications, and turn everything off. Under General, you can also stop it from launching at startup, though some Adobe apps complain if it isn’t running.
\nFor the popups that survive settings, there’s a registry-level option for Acrobat: Adobe documents a key called bUsageMeasurement and IT admins use a set of keys under HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Policies\\Adobe to suppress upsell messaging. Searching “Acrobat disable in-app messages registry” gets you the current keys for your version. This is the approach corporate IT departments use because Adobe’s consumer-facing toggles don’t cover everything, which tells you what Adobe thinks of the consumer-facing toggles.
\nIf your work is mostly PDF reading, commenting, and light editing, consider whether you need Acrobat at all. Foxit and PDF-XChange Editor handle most PDF work, cost less, and nag less.
\nLike Windows, expect some settings to revert after major updates. The vendors have learned that most people give up re-disabling things, and the ones who don’t are a rounding error.
\nWho are the other most abusive software companies?
\nOracle sits at the top of most lists. Its business model runs on audits. It sells you licenses with terms vague enough that almost any customer can be found out of compliance, then sends auditors to find the violations and converts the findings into settlements, which usually means buying more Oracle. Java licensing changes in 2023 moved to per-employee pricing, so a company with 5,000 employees pays for all 5,000 even if twelve developers touch Java. Lawyers who work software contracts describe Oracle audits as a revenue division.
\nIntuit lobbied for years to keep the IRS from offering free tax filing, then buried its own Free File option so people who qualified paid anyway. The FTC ruled its “free” advertising deceptive in 2024. TurboTax exists to charge you for what the tax code already requires you to do, and the company spends millions keeping it that way.
\nSalesforce and SAP practice hostage pricing: the cost of leaving exceeds the pain of staying. Your data lives in their formats, your workflows bend around their structures, and renewal negotiations start from the premise that migration would cost you two years and millions. SAP charges “indirect access” fees when your other software talks to your SAP system, meaning you pay them because your own systems communicate.
\nBroadcom bought VMware in 2023 and became the fastest case study. It killed perpetual licenses, forced subscription bundles, and raised prices on some customers by 300 to 1,000 percent, betting that virtualized infrastructure is too painful to migrate. The bet has mostly paid.
\nEpson and HP turned printers into subscription traps. HP ships firmware updates that brick third-party ink cartridges. Its Instant Ink program keeps charging you monthly whether you print or not, and if you cancel, the cartridges already in your printer stop working, ink you paid for, disabled remotely.
\nAncestry and 23andMe hold your genetic data under terms of service they can change. Ring built a partnership network giving police access to doorbell footage. Meta’s abuses are their own category.
\nThe common thread: each company found a point where switching costs, network effects, or legal complexity let it stop competing on quality. Microsoft nags you because it can. Oracle audits you because it can. The abuse scales with the lock-in.
\nFacebook\/Meta leads by scale of harm. Internal research showed Instagram damages teenage girls’ mental health and the company shipped growth features anyway. It ran psychological experiments on users without consent, manipulating news feeds to test emotional contagion. Its engagement algorithms learned that anger and fear hold attention, so anger and fear got amplified across two billion people. The Cambridge Analytica episode was less an aberration than the platform working as designed: user data was the product from the start.
\nAmazon abuses both sides of its marketplace. It uses sales data from third-party sellers to clone their products, then buries the originals in search results below its own versions. It packs results with ads that look like results. Prime cancellation was engineered as a maze; the FTC sued over the design, which Amazon internally called “Iliad” after an epic about a long grueling ordeal. Its review system drowns in fakes it profits from and polices half-heartedly.
\nGoogle turned search into an ad auction wearing a search costume. The top of most commercial queries is paid placement styled to look organic. It tracked location data after users turned location tracking off. YouTube’s recommendation engine spent years radicalizing viewers toward extreme content because extreme content kept them watching, and the company adjusted only after journalists documented it.
\nTicketmaster operates a tollbooth on live music. Fees run 20 to 30 percent of face value, itemized as service charges, facility charges, and processing charges for a transaction that costs it pennies. Its merger with Live Nation gave it the venues, the promotion, and the ticketing, so artists and fans have nowhere else to go.
\nAirbnb and DoorDash mastered drip pricing: the price you see first bears little relation to what you pay at checkout after cleaning fees, service fees, and regulatory recovery charges appear. Both companies also lobbied to keep their workers classified as contractors while controlling their work like employees.
\nLinkedIn sends emails engineered to look like personal messages from colleagues. Dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, both owned by Match Group, face lawsuits alleging their algorithms withhold likely matches from paying users because a matched user stops paying. The product succeeds when it fails.
\nPayPal freezes accounts and holds sellers’ money for 180 days with minimal explanation and no meaningful appeal. For small merchants, that hold can be fatal.
\nThe pattern from the software companies repeats here: every one of these services found a chokepoint. Meta owns social connection, Google owns discovery, Amazon owns distribution, Ticketmaster owns venues. Once the chokepoint is secure, the customer experience becomes a cost center to be mined rather than a product to be improved. Cory Doctorow (b. 1971) named the process “enshittification”: platforms are good to users until users are locked in, then good to business customers until they are locked in, then extract value from both. The coinage stuck because the sequence keeps repeating.
\nAre there any good guys?
\nYes, and they cluster into recognizable types.
\nThe nonprofit and foundation model produces the most reliable good behavior. Wikipedia runs on donations, carries no ads, sells no data, and remains one of the most visited sites on earth. Mozilla’s Firefox survives as the browser that answers to a foundation rather than an ad business, though its dependence on Google search payments compromises the independence. Signal offers encrypted messaging funded by donations and a foundation endowment; it cannot sell your data because it designed its systems so it never has your data. The Internet Archive preserves the web and lends books, and gets sued by publishers for its trouble. Craigslist stayed ugly, cheap, and functional for thirty years while a hundred better-funded competitors tried to enshittify the classified ad and failed.
\nThe paid-product model works when the customer and the revenue source are the same person. Kagi charges for search, so it has no advertiser to serve; results answer to you. Fastmail and Proton charge for email and in exchange do not read it. 1Password, Bear, and Things charge money for software and then behave like companies that want you to renew. Apple belongs partly in this camp: because hardware margins fund the business, it can market privacy as a feature, though its App Store practices and repair hostility disqualify it from full membership.
\nThe open-source world runs on a different economy. VLC plays every video format ever devised, takes no money, shows no ads, and has turned down offers reportedly in the tens of millions to bundle adware. LibreOffice, Linux, Blender, and OBS give away tools that commercial vendors charge rent for. Home Assistant lets you run a smart home without shipping your daily routines to a cloud.
\nSome commercial companies simply behave well within a for-profit frame. Valve’s Steam earned dominance in PC games with three-decade-old purchases that still download, generous refunds, and no forced subscriptions. Backblaze publishes its hard drive failure data for the industry’s benefit and prices backup honestly. Bandcamp, before and mostly after its ownership changes, passed most revenue to musicians. DuckDuckGo built a search business on the promise of not tracking you and has kept it.
\nThe common thread inverts the abuse pattern. Every abusive company we walked through found a chokepoint and mined it. Every company on this list either refused the chokepoint (open source, nonprofits), or aligned payment with service so the user is the customer rather than the inventory (Kagi, Fastmail, 1Password), or held market power and declined to fully exploit it, which is rarest (Valve, Craigslist). The lesson is structural: goodness in software correlates less with founder virtue than with a business model where mistreating you costs the company money. When you can find a service where you are the paying customer and leaving is easy, the incentives do most of the moral work.<\/p>\n
I’m happy with Google because its core products work. Search still answers most questions faster than anything except maybe an AI chat. Gmail has been reliable for two decades and its spam filtering remains the best in the business. Maps is one of the great engineering achievements of the century, and it’s free. Docs, Drive, Photos, Calendar, YouTube: each one leads or nearly leads its category, they cooperate with each other, and the price to you is zero dollars.
\nThe criticisms I listed are true and the products are excellent. Both hold. Google’s bargain differs from Oracle’s or Ticketmaster’s: those companies take your money and give you a bad experience. Google gives you a good experience and takes your data. For many people that trade is rational. You get world-class infrastructure for free, and the cost, being profiled for ads, lands lightly on you if you were going to see ads somewhere anyway and would rather they be relevant.
\nThe bargain has two weak points. First, lock-in accumulates quietly. Twenty years of email, photos, and documents in one company’s hands means the exit gets harder every year, and Google has a habit of killing products people depend on (Reader, Inbox, Podcasts, the graveyard is long). Google Takeout does let you export everything, which puts Google ahead of most rivals on this score. Second, account suspension is the catastrophic tail risk. Google’s automated systems sometimes lock accounts with no human appeal, and people have lost email, photos, and documents in one stroke. The fix costs little: keep a periodic Takeout backup and register your own domain for email forwarding so your address survives any provider.
\nDo those two things and you’ve kept the upside of the bargain while capping the downside. Happiness with Google is a reasonable position; unhedged happiness is the only version I’d talk you out of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. Tuesday, 7:42 a.m. Dave Kowalski, 51, regional claims manager, two monitors, a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST GOLFER. He presses the power button and Windows tells him it has an update to finish. The bar crawls. He drinks his … Continue reading