Stockholders invest for one reason: profits. If you don't take your company public, you have more freedom to do what you want, even if it's not quite the most profitable in terms of dollars. I personally got into electronics for fun, not money. When the fun is gone, so am I.
I agree with you. And that's one reason why electronics is my hobby, not my profession.
What entices gullible consumers and produces profits isn't necessarily what's smart. They'll go for what's flashy, or a fad, or think that new always means better. Bill Gates realized decades ago that he was in the business of frustration. A new version comes out with a few new features, and everyone's got to get it. Frustrations are built in, but you won't find them right away. After people do start finding the problems and complaining, the answer is, "Oh, you're still using that old version?? You just need to buy this new one. All those problems are taken care of, and it can do all this new cool stuff," and the cycle repeats, and he gets to hit you again in the wallet just seldom enough that you don't notice the plan. I quit using Windows years ago and 90% of my computer problems evaporated.
Your experience is perfectly valid. But the bottom line is that businesses operate vastly more efficiently than they have in the past because of the deeply flawed efforts of the company you disdain. And while the market has served up plenty of other deeply flawed alternatives, none of them provided enough of an advantage over Microsoft's offerings to significantly alter the market -- at least not until Google and Apple came along. There is no PerfectOS, no matter how much the Apple and Linux fanboys claim otherwise.
Windows 10, and now the updates from it that they're starting to apply to Windows 7 & 8, bring huge problems with snooping. Someone else here (I don't remember who) said you just have to know how to get around it; but I've read more articles since then telling about parts of it that you cannot turn off, and that even if you think you have all the snooping turned off, they're still recording some of your info and using it for marketing.
There is a lot of FUD out there about snooping. Bottom line is that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others all do it for advertising purposes. You can opt out and give up smartphones, web browsing, smart TVs and many of the other advantages modern technology brings. But you may not have to give up as much privacy as you think in order to enjoy most of the value that technology brings. Have a look at Bruce Schneier's web site (
https://www.schneier.com/) for some ideas. It keeps me in touch with the most significant threats to my privacy and lets me know what I can do to limit them.
Regarding development systems, I know every company pushes their own, but someone with a lot of experience often has their own system that they've been refining for years, and they have become very efficient with it, and they don't want to be told they have to do things a different way.
But is it realistic to expect your efforts to be able to compete with the efforts of entire communities working towards the same goals. Eclipse and NetBeans are defacto standards for IDEs these days and they have come a long way from the early days. They are also easily customized for your own specialized needs if you want.
Again, I like the philosophy put forth in the following articles:
Not surprisingly, I also like the philosophy in those articles (though admittedly I just skimmed over them -- I did bookmark them for more thorough reading later). I do see a day in the future where governments will have mandatory backdoors in all off-the-shelf computing platforms available to the general public. To the extent that I'd like to be able to maintain a modest local archive of personal data not accessible to whomever is in power at any given moment, I am confident in my ability to create a suitable system from available parts if it becomes prudent. I don't see it as an imminent threat, however.
In terms of computer languages, I don't see the world nearly so black and white as some others do. Forth and C are two different tools with some overlap. Forth does some things better on some platforms, and C does other things better. If you only have a hammer in your toolchest, then everything looks like a nail to you. But if your toolbox is full of mutually complementary tools, you can pick the one that best suits the problem at hand. I will say, however, that on the 6502 at least, I'd strongly prefer a good Forth implementation to any C compiler I've ever seen.
