You should be boycotting these companies already because they support extreme right politics by their ALEC membership:
- FedEx
- UPS
- Motorola
- Anheuser Busch
- American Express
- Bose
- Chevron
- Marlboro
- Sony
- Texaco
- Boeing (fly on Airbus instead, see how to boycott Boeing)
You should be boycotting Amazon for many reasons.
If you oppose private prisons, then you already boycott these banks:
- #BankOfAmerica (#BofA)
- #FifthThird
- #JPMorgan #Chase
- #PNC Bank
- #Suntrust
- #USBank (#USBancorp)
- #WellsFargo
Don’t think they are out of reach to Europe -- many European small banks that you assume are ethical actually outsource their investments to JP Morgan. Also, BofA uses different branding outside the US.
If you like transparency with food labeling, then you endorse labeling of #GMO food, in which case you boycott companies that lobbied against GMO labeling. There are hundreds of companies that fucked us over, but these are the top ten financers of anti-labeling lobby:
- PepsiCo
- Nestlé
- General Mills
- Coca-Cola
- ConAgra
- Campbell Soup
- The Hershey Company
- J.M. Smucker
- Kellogg
- Mondelez
Some of those mushroom into many brands. See the attached infographic.
I think its a bit silly to think of a boycott in terms of things other people use. So don't run exchange for you private mail server and sure you can petition your government not to use microsoft but you are not falling to boycott microsoft because document you made in libre office and attached to an email you sent on your linux mahine was recieved by an exchange server.
Of course it’s a failure to boycott. Every time you send email to a Microsoft recipient, you feed profitable data to the MS ad surveillance machine. You also open the door to give the recipient an email address so when they reply you effectively facilitate more food to MS to the extent that you have no control over. And worse, you also signal to the recipient that their email setup works.. that it serves them and rewards their choice.
If you boycott MS effectively, then you use snail mail (absent other channels). You feed nothing to MS and block your recipient from using you to feed MS more. You also give badly needed help to the postal service. Look what happened to Denmark. They lost the option to boycott MS. Those people will soon be entirely disempowered, forced to support whatever tech giant naive recipients choose.
Microsoft loves it that you think you can simply avoid running some of their binary code and work under the illusion that you are not supporting MS.
As a person in the tech space, let me give you my opinion on all of this.
It's not, because YOU are the one boycotting and not the other user. If you can convince everyone to ditch GMail, Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo or others, then yeah, you guys are boycotting well. But if the end user of something YOU sent doesn't boycott, they have no reason to change their client and it is not a failed boycott. Because even if one user boycotts, it is still better if no one boycotted.
The end user would be inconveniencing themselves by communicating with you, because you decided to use something else and force them to use that same thing with you. Imagine this, you use Email Client 1 but the user you sent the email to, uses Corporate Mail 1. Are you going to tell the user that in order to communicate with you they should completely ditch Corporate Mail 1 and use Email Client 1? Don't you think that is being an inconvenience?
This almost makes me think of some Vegan, animal rights activists, which will tell you how terrible you are for eating meat.
Also, unfortunately, Microsoft and Apple are the industry standards for when it comes to Personal Computing and Workstations.
Imagine using snail mail in the digital age to send important documents that need to be signed by tomorrow. Do you realize just how much time and money would take to send a letter from, say, Poland to France?
Not a chance, especially not for critical things.
Using something like Proton would definitely help make things more secure AND less money for the U.S, but how many people do you know that use Proton Mail? 2? 5? 10?
Fact of the matter is, some companies are unavoidable, especially in the workplace.
Don't inconvenience your colleagues by forcing them to use a different client than what they are used to already. Or, if you want to introduce a new provider, introduce it slowly. Give people the time they need to let it settle in better.
I will also say something that was said here earlier, this way of thinking is incredibly "purist" and too much "perfectionism"
Don't let "perfect" get in the way of "Good"
People are already struggling to boycott US companies, let alone this purist version you have here.
Also, forgot to add...
If you want to avoid Microsoft and Google, good luck with that because a vast majority of search engines use either Microsoft's Bing API or Google's API.
And in order to make a search engine that is not tied with Google or Microsoft, it has to be self-hosted, self-coded and completely self-reliant.
That’s an easy one. For the past several years, this was the absolute best:
ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion
That service scraped from Google and Bing thus did not finance them. It also filtered out Cloudflare resuits. It’s gone now, but there are countless other instances which do not use the MS or Google API (which feeds them). Most searx instances scrape the results, which ultimately costs MS and Google.