Little Tech (Premium)

I often highlight the changes I make to the apps and services I rely on. But the events of the past year have triggered an even bigger shift. With enshittification scrambling the value proposition of so many Big Tech solutions, I find myself drifting away from those abusive monopolies and seeking out products from smaller, independent companies that protect the privacy of their users while meeting their needs, and at no or low cost.

This is a shift to what I think of as Little Tech.

I didn’t come up with this term, of course, but I was surprised to see that I had written a story about Little Tech practically begging the U.S. Congress to take on Big Tech’s many abuses over 5 years ago. (I write so much, even I can’t keep it straight.) But that’s an interesting starting point. Since then, regulators around the world have finally started closing in on the most egregious and predatory behaviors at Apple, Google, and Microsoft, especially. And the companies mentioned in that article–Basecamp, PopSockets, Sonos, and Tile–are good examples of Little Tech companies, though I have many more to discuss.

To be clear, this isn’t above dropping Big Tech entirely. Like you, I will do what’s right for me and for my loved ones. And that still includes Big Tech offerings, though perhaps in a reduced capacity or as backup. But I will also continue to be clear-eyed about the predatory behaviors that Big Tech companies exhibit in their apps and services, and I will reject those that are either too abusive or do things that I can’t work around or fix.

I’m not sure where this goes, or even how to frame this discussion, really. But I assume most know by now that my professional career paralleled the rise to dominance of Microsoft in the 1990s. And that as the quality of its products, starting with Office, improved in that period, my loathing of the company was gradually replaced with respect. By the end of the 1990s, my support of Microsoft–really, my support of Microsoft’s customers–was pragmatic. Microsoft was personal computing, and it was unavoidable.

This changed throughout the early 2000s. As Steven Sinofsky describes and laments in his epic book Hardcore Software, Microsoft by that point had evolved beyond focusing on individuals to focus on businesses and then enterprises, the biggest businesses of all. That this shift paralleled my own professional shift–I started writing for and then working for the company that published Windows NT Magazine, which went on to be renamed several times, in 1999–is interesting, but also coincidental. But it’s fair to say that by the time I left that company, in late 2014, I had had it with enterprise computing. I want to focus on personal technology again. And pretty much only personal technology.

This presented a curious problem. I had spent the previous 15 years covering mostly Microsoft, ping-ponging between its consumer and business offerings. But this was also the period in which Microsoft succumbed to two major antitrust battles and the resulting settlements. And it lost its way with consumers, leading to the rise of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google that the pre-antitrust Microsoft would have handily defeated.

That those companies, along with Microsoft, are Big Tech today is interesting. That Microsoft, despite being sidelined in personal computing, and especially with consumers–Xbox being the lone exception–is even bigger today, much, much, bigger, is likewise interesting. But that bigness came about thanks to cloud computing, and that is not at all interesting, at least to me. And there’s the problem: As I shifted back to what I really care about with Thurrott.com starting in early 2015, Microsoft was unsteadily dropping almost all its consumer-focused products and services. The world, put simply, was then, and is now, a different place. A more heterogeneous place.

That’s good, of course. But it hasn’t stopped a handful of companies, those noted above, from dominating every important sub-market within personal computing, and divvying up the world between them. This isn’t quite the keiretsu system that we experienced with Japanese companies in the 1980s, where competitors would coexist and help each other. But it’s not that far off. For example, Apple invented an arbitrary and overly -expensive App Store fee structure, and Google just copied it for the Play Store, with no more rationalization than that’s what Apple does. What’s good for the goose is good for the other goose, I guess.

One company or several companies, it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s Microsoft by itself in the late 1990s or Big Tech collectively today, the deck is stacked against us either way. These companies don’t care about what we want or need. They care about what they want and need, and they are perhaps too willing to stab us all in the back to obtain that. This, again, is enshittification. It’s what happens when companies abuse their own customers because their strategic needs outweigh our benefit to that company.

I’ve made this point before, but it’s worth repeating. This kind of relationship is unhealthy. And Big Tech isn’t going to fix the problem. They will sometimes be cajoled to change by new regulations like the Digital Market Act (DMA) or by suddenly aggressive regulators belatedly enforcing existing laws. But they will never listen to us, their customers, will never do the right thing. And so the onus is on us. We can walk away from those unhealthy relationships, which can be difficult, or we can simply approach them clear-eyed. We can take what we need from these companies when and if it makes sense to do so.

So I guess that’s my approach. But thinking back on the world of 20 years ago, say, I was hip-deep in Microsoft products and services, most of which–almost all of which–no longer exist. The two through-threads are Windows and Xbox. I still use each platform regularly, and I still prefer them to their competitors. And both are under attack from within. Both are enshittified in ways that I find to be depressing and alarming. It’s like watching a loved one succumb to an addiction and being helpless to act.

As I write this, I’m on my couch in my apartment in Mexico City, a situation I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams five years ago, let alone 20 years ago. Sitting here, I can navigate into the file system of my Synology NAS, thousands of miles away in Pennsylvania, as easily and as quickly as I Can with OneDrive or Google Drive. And as I browse through my archives from 2005, from 20 years ago, I see an almost never-ending list of references to products and services that no longer exist.

Brace yourself.

MSN Music. Windows XP Starter Edition. Microsoft Antispyware. MSN Direct and SPOT Watches. Longhorn. MSN Search. The first 64-bit version of Windows XP. Windows Media Video. Internet Explorer 7. MSN Video. The Experience Pack for Tablet PC. MSN Messenger 7.0. Windows Mobile 5.0. MapPoint. Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006. Windows OneCare Live. The Windows Vista naming reveal. Windows Media Connect. The Palm Treo smartphone on Windows Mobile. Windows XP Media Center 2005 Update Rollup 2. Windows Desktop Search. MTV URGE. Xbox 360. The first Office 12 previews. And so many more.

You may recall Apple’s “What’s on your PowerBook?” ads from the 1990s. They were an early inspiration for what became “What I Use,” and as I meandered in and out of various folders from the events of 20 years ago, I realized that what I needed to see most of all was a basic screenshot of my PC desktop, one that would show the apps I used most frequently. In that, I came up short. But I did find an early “What I Use” write-up, from 2007, that listed such things as Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Gallery, Microsoft Digital Image Suite, Windows Movie Maker, IE 7, Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Media Center, Microsoft OneNote, Windows Mobile Device Center, and so on. It’s enough.

In 2005 (or 2007), I was starting to use more non-Microsoft apps, things like Mozilla Firefox (of which I was an early supporter), Apple iTunes (with whatever iPod), Google Picasa 2, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and more. But it was still mostly Microsoft.

Today, my Taskbar–as in “What’s pinned to your Taskbar?”–shows Microsoft Edge, Paint, and Notepad, each of which comes with Windows 11. But the other entries are all Little Tech: Typora (for writing in Markdown, an open text-based format), Notion (note-taking, but also a sort of “everything” app), Affinity Photo (photo/image editing), and Slack.

Beyond those, I use Clipchamp (for video editing), which is part of Windows 11, Xbox, Visual Studio (software development), and PowerToys. But much of my other regular-use apps are likewise from third parties, most of them smaller companies. Greenshot (for screenshots), LanguageTool (for spell and grammar checking), OBS Studio (screen recording), and several other utilities. I use Proton Pass for password/identity management. Instapaper for reading later. And so on.

So I guess it’s a mix. And by design. As noted up top, we all have to do what’s right for us. Sometimes that will be Big Tech. Increasingly, for me at least, it is not.

The enshittification in OneDrive drove me to Google Drive and then more recently to Synology Drive, on my NAS. The enshittification in Office drove me to Markdown and Typora. The enshittification in Microsoft Edge led me to Brave and other browsers, and to Proton Pass. None of this was planned. All of it was forced. But what I got on the other end was a sense of stability and peace. Relationships that are healthy and for me, not against me.

This isn’t going to end. And in thinking about the companies that I explicitly trust and align with, some obvious choices emerge.

• Notion, which I’ve written about many times, is an incredible app that could serve even more use cases for me than it does. But also Mail and Calendar solutions–and AI–that I find unnecessary.
• Proton, which puts privacy and the customer relationship above all else. Today, that’s mostly Proton Pass for me, but its entire suite of offerings is interesting and something I always have my eye on.
• DuckDuckGo, which makes a browser I desperately want to use if only it would add a handful of necessary missing features (like extension support), a search engine I should be using, and an AI chatbot I just wrote about today and find very interesting.
• Affinity, which makes incredible creative apps like Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, that can be purchased outright and used on any number of devices. Affinity was purchased by Canva last year, and that, too, is an interesting alternative to “Big Creative Tech”, i.e. Adobe.
• Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and (still, sort of) Mozilla, for Firefox. Each makes web browsers that are safer and more private than Chrome and Edge will ever be. And The Browser Company, which may or may not be leading the way to the AI web browser future with Dia.
• Automattic, which owns WordPress and Woocommerce (both of which I use at Thurrott.com), plus Beeper (messaging, which I am now experimenting with on mobile), Day One (journaling), Pocket Casts (podcasts, which I use and recommend), Tumblr (blogging), and much more.

Some Little Tech companies, like Mozilla and Sonos, have lost their way. Maybe they recover; we’ll see. I will keep an open mind, but I’m not going to sink with those ships either way.

Beyond that, of course, are many one-off solutions, like some of the utilities I note above. These are too many to count, and I feel like some of them are like the classic Robert Dinero quote in the movie Heat, in that (paraphrasing here) “we should not get attached to anything we’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat.” But many are open source.

Now, that is interesting.

I can’t possibly provide an exhaustive list of the open source software I use (or have tested), trust, or recommend here. But I can get started, with the understanding that I will absolutely forget something important.

• Linux. This is, of course, a step too far for most, myself included, but I spend more time on this than you perhaps know. And I am not above the nuclear option if that’s what makes sense for me. For now, I’ll just say that I most closely associate with Zorin and Elementary OS, plus Ubuntu and Mint among the more popular distributions.
• LibreOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, though there are many open source Office suites, like OnlyOffice, that others may prefer.
• OpenShot for video editing, though I feel like CapCut or even Davinci Resolve, if I could ever get over the learning curve, would be a better choice. All are reasonable alternatives to Adobe Premiere.
• Anytype, Joplin, or Obsidian (which I is open-ish, and not truly open source) for notes, though I am so stuck on Notion that switching may be problematic.
• GIMP for image editing, though I find the UI a bit tough. I would consider Paint.NET first (not open). That said, Affinity beats them both.
• VLC media player for video, a no brainer.

There’s so much more.

The big one, of course, is AI, which will almost certainly be dominated by Big Tech, and that’s a problem. But I still struggle with messaging apps, and that’s why Beeper is so interesting. Ditto for social media services–Twitter/X, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon–none of which are ideal, none that I truly trust. I use Substack for the Eternal Spring blog, and I could see using that more. I’m sure there’s more still. Again, I will forget something important.

But you have to start somewhere. And this is where I’m at now. I expect further changes throughout 2025 and beyond. That is the nature of things.