I am a home user, but I use Zoho's paid email service as a backup and alternative to Gmail and Outlook, and it is pretty decent and extremely affordable.
Reverse argument is true as well..
If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.
All software is vulnerable, so what you're saying is not true. The only reason the products you listed seem more vulnerable is because they are focused by malicious actors due to their popularity and hence, also more often in the news.
Actually, the more the popularity or criticality of a product or system, the higher the likelihood that malicious actors may target it. So any such product or system needs adequate security measures and IT staff to protect and maintain it.
That's why iPhones and Androids get jailbroken (as they dominate the mobile OS market), that's why Windows has max viruses and worms to infect it (since it is on max number of PCs worldwide), that's why even Linux is being hacked/targeted (these days via malicious github packages, because Linux is becoming more popular, especially due to Valve's pushing SteamOS for Linux gaming).
No, I think you’ll find certain legacy corporations have terrible codebases and very little incentive to fix it, because why fix what makes money and has no liability?
Naive people in corporations think Linux and other FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) can save them from Microsoft, Oracle, etc. woes.
But the reality is that corporates have very less incentive to migrate to open-source alternatives. Because it would mean negligible/no support, less work and hence less staffing (senior management have to justify the staffing headcount somehow).
FOSS solutions typically don't get proper (or in some cases, not even any) support from the solution makers (developer company/persons).
Corporates thrive internally on liability (they always want to blame someone, easiest target are their IT staff), and thrive externally by trying to avoid liability.
e.g., Big Pharma (Pfizer, sold hundreds of millions of COVID vaccines worldwide, after ensuring those target countries (including their own country) first gave them complete indemnity from any liability for the negative effects or lack of efficacy of the vaccines.
Starting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose.
Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads.
The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers.
Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.
They are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do.
A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits.
And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?
Oracle did the same cheap dirty trick for profits, when it is bundled adware/spyware (Ask toolbar) by default on its JRE (Java Runtime Installer) used on millions of corporate and student/home PCs, because it knew Java/JRE would already be whitelisted on those machines (Java gets updates, so IT admins tend to whitelist its EXEcutable and its installer (JRE installer), since it is necessary for corporate work (many legacy software depend on Java)).
Suddenly, many IT admins were in a tough spot explaining to many internal customers (including senior management; even CxO's have Java on their office laptops) why their PCs were suddenly flooded with popup ads and even ads on intranet sites (because Ask toolbar integrated into the browser)).
Google used to have a motto/policy of "Do Not Evil", but it silently dropped that approach. It had to do so, because its biggest rivals had already adopted and profited from the evil attitudes, so it too simply followed the evil tide.
The world has always been ruled by the oligarchs (the richest and most powerful people), but in modern era, it is the biggest corporates (especially trillion dollar valuation companies) that call the shots. And they continue do as they please, bending even powerful nations to their will.
Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
Oh, this reminds me of the horror days when Oracle deliberately rolled out spyware (Ask Toolbar) in the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installer, that corporate admins and developers/testers inadvertently installed on millions of PCs.
Oracle never apologised for this sudden hijack (of an executable that was trusted and used by millions of IT people) and malicious behavior (no prior information given by Oracle for this malpractice), if I recall right.
I am sure that disaster was a wake up call for many developers and corporations to move away from Java dependency.
AFAIK: Pythagoras never wrote about this Triangle Theorem. There's no proof that he ever even knew about it. But he had mandated to his Pythagorean school (students) that any discovery or invention they made would be attributed to him instead.
The earliest known mention of Pythagoras's name in connection with the theorem occurred five centuries after his death, in the writings of Cicero and Plutarch.
Interestingly:
the Triangle Theorem was discovered, known and used by the ancient Indians and ancient Babylonians & Egyptians long before the ancient Greeks came to know about it. India's ancient temples are built using this theorem, India's mathematician Boudhyana (c. ~800 BCE) wrote about it in his Baudhayana Shulba (Shulva) Sutras around 800 BCE, the Egyptian pharoahs built the pyramids using this triangle theorem.
Baudhāyana, (fl. c. 800 BCE) was the author of the Baudhayana sūtras, which cover dharma, daily ritual, mathematics, etc. He belongs to the Yajurveda school, and is older than the other sūtra author Āpastambha. He was the author of the earliest Sulba Sūtra—appendices to the Vedas giving rules for the construction of altars—called the Baudhāyana Śulbasûtra. These are notable from the point of view of mathematics, for containing several important mathematical results, including giving a value of pi to some degree of precision, and stating a version of what is now known as the Pythagorean theorem. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudhayana
Baudhyana lived and wrote such incredible mathematical insights several centuries before Pythagoras.
Note that Baudhayana Shulba Sutra not only gives a statement of the Triangle Theorem, it also gives proof of it.
There is a difference between discovering Pythagorean triplets (ex 6:8:10) and proving the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2 = c2 ).
Ancient Babylonians accomplished only the former, whereas ancient Indians accomplished both. Specifically, Baudhayana gives a geometrical proof of the triangle theorem for an isosceles right triangle.
The four major Shulba Sutras, which are mathematically the most significant, are those attributed to Baudhayana, Manava, Apastamba and Katyayana.
Refer to:
Boyer, Carl B. (1991). A History of Mathematics (Second ed.), John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-54397-7.
Boyer (1991), p. 207, says: "We find rules for the construction of right angles by means of triples of cords the lengths of which form Pythagorean triages, such as 3, 4, and 5, or 5, 12, and 13, or 8, 15, and 17, or 12, 35, and 37. However all of these triads are easily derived from the old Babylonian rule; hence, Mesopotamian influence in the Sulvasutras is not unlikely. Aspastamba knew that the square on the diagonal of a rectangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two adjacent sides, but this form of the Pythagorean theorem also may have been derived from Mesopotamia. ... So conjectural are the origin and period of the Sulbasutras that we cannot tell whether or not the rules are related to early Egyptian surveying or to the later Greek problem of altar doubling. They are variously dated within an interval of almost a thousand years stretching from the eighth century B.C. to the second century of our era."
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