I've found Proton Pass to struggle with autofill in some situations where BitWarden doesn't, and their create alias+create new login for alias flow has failed me sometimes, which is awkward, to say the least.
The big players would be fools to sell data, as such. Their whole thing is that they are so big they can target ads effectively. You'd be a fool to sell that data. They sell ad targeting and ad placement, not the data to do those things.
Money is money, and companies want more. Of course if they notice they can both sell you the product and have you be the product, they'll ask themselves "Why not both?"
The login thing is also probably partly because it does genuinely make the user experience better - log into a computer, To Do has your tasks, OneDrive and OneNote start fetching your notes and files, Edge seamlessly syncs your browser history, and so on. Things Just Work™. MS has a cloud-based clipboard and Edge has a OneDrive-backed AirDrop clone. All of that needs accounts to function properly.
A lot of productivity type people on Twitter are to some extent slaves to fashion, and in that world eg. Microsoft just doesn't exist. Cool people don't use it, so we end up in a comedy world where ostensible productivity experts gush over random startups' products while M365 is like six times the size of Google Workspace, which again dwarfs all the startups by itself. It gets really silly sometimes when they start gushing about like, a new way to make slide decks. Then you read some essay about all the ways GSlides is torture, and you start to understand.
Importantly: The ribbon also makes the shortcut chords discoverable, so people can find shortcuts for the stuff they use often by themselves. It lets you get at tons of functions both as a first-timer discovering stuff visually, as well as a seasoned veteran with keyboard alone. There's some things they could polish a bit (colour pickers, mainly), but the system is overall really good.
Yeah, I'm still on a 1080p monitor as my main one. I don't think any of my laptops have screens where 100% or 200% scaling is the correct choice, either, unless you're DHH level obsessed with font rendering.
Oh, very cool. Thanks for sharing -- glad to know I have this option if I want to go back. Now that I have Thunderbird set up, I'll probably never use the UWP Mail and Calendar app or this Wino Mail app.
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