Cost of traffic for a hardware monitoring/config utility? Not everything needs to be a service, and this is also a perfect example of why some things shouldn't be services, just plain old downloadable software.

Yet people will happily use frigging GOOGLE out of all services _as a calculator_ rather than their happily locally working and probably much more featureful calculator app.

People are using, for a simple two digit multiplication, a bazillion tons of hardware distributed thorugh hundreds of countries hundreds of miles away. Even the simplest microcontroller amongst all the hardware participating in this www query would be able to do hundreds of these simple multiplications _per nanosecond_. But no, people query google.

> probably much more featureful calculator app

Hum... I've got out of my way to install qalc, but Google is much more featureful than anything you find on Windows or that comes by default on most Linuxes.

Convenience. You can google the answer faster than your calculator app can even open.

If this was true for _any_ platform I would immediately throw it away.

But the point is that there is, for some reason, a pressure for platforms to be this way; convenience is not the cause.

Unfortunately it is true for almost any platform I've tried. Calculator applications have become as bloated as everything else.

The Windows calculator can take seconds to launch, if you already have a browser open C-t and then entering a quick calculation is much faster. Even on systems like macOS where the calculator opens quickly, again if you already have a browser open creating a new tab and querying is faster for any short calculation.

By cost of traffic i mean: cost of acquiring users/clients. Nowadays it makes everything which is not a clickbaity, addiction-based scam, pretty much futile. Slowly but surely, Internet becomes a land of sociopaths, no one else gets to make much money.