I expect these comments to be full of agreement. Corporate behavior in the computer space leaves much to he desired.

I will however observe;

None of the supplied examples showed any form of network effect. It was all stuff you did at home.

Today, there are certainly options for personal computing for most everything- as long as network effects are not in play.

Those options may not be as convenient, as cheap, or as feature-rich as the invasive option. That's fair though - you decide what you want to prioritize.

Network effects are harder to deal with. To the extent that in order to be in community you need to adopt the software the community has chosen.

Not surprisingly, software producers that can build-in network effects, do so. It's excellent from a lock-in point of view.

The title of the article is perhaps then ironic. It's trivial to make computing personal. All the tools to do so already exist.

The issue is not Personal Computing. It's Community Computing.

This article made me even more sad than I already was. I've just been reading about Bambu Lab (a leading 3d printer manufacturer, who introduced really good 3d printers a couple of years ago and really shook up the entire market) self-destructing itself and burning through all the goodwill accumulated over the years. They are working on closing down access to their printers, apparently with the end goal of locked-down subscription-based access. This is much like the path that HP followed with their printers.

I also write this on a Mac, where I'm watching with sadness the formerly great company being run by bean-counters, who worry about profits, not user experience. The Mac is being progressively locked down and many things break in the process. Yes, it is still better than Windows, where apparently the start menu is just advertising space and the desktop isn't mine, but Microsoft's, but the path is definitely sloping down.

It's just sad.

I don't know what else to write. There isn't much we can do, as long as everybody tolerates this.