What I Couldn't Leave (And Why I'm Telling You)
Every other site about ditching Big Tech is written by somebody pretending they pulled it off completely. They didn’t. Nobody did. And the pretending is exactly why those guides make you feel like a failure — you follow the steps, hit the first wall, and assume you screwed up. You didn’t. The wall is real and they just didn’t mention it.
So before I tell you what to change, here’s everything I couldn’t — and I do this for a living.
Microsoft
I’m a Microsoft Partner. My entire business — the systems I manage for clients, my licensing, my vendor relationships — runs through a Microsoft work account. There is no privacy-friendly version of that. It’s load-bearing. It stays.
I build browser extensions. You cannot publish a Chrome extension without a Google developer account. Period. I’ve decoupled my Google login from nearly everything else — but the dev account itself? Stuck with it. A few times a week some website still forces me through “Sign in with Google” and I grit my teeth and do it.
Apple
I use a Mac. I use other Apple hardware. The hardware is genuinely good and the account is the price of admission. I made peace with it.
The ancient outlook.com address
I got it in 2000 to register for Microsoft certification exams. It still works. It is duct-taped to things I’ve long forgotten. My official position is: it works, leave it alone, and thank God.
Here’s the point. The goal was never zero. The goal is knowing exactly what you kept and why.
Most of what ties you to Big Tech is cheap to leave — the stuff you do out of habit, not necessity. A little of it is load-bearing — pull it out and your job or your life falls over. The entire skill is telling those two apart, leaving the cheap stuff, and keeping the load-bearing stuff on purpose instead of by default.
That’s it. That’s the whole philosophy. Everything else on this site is just working through it one piece at a time.