The absurdity of loving and hating tech brands

I am not into “loving” or “hating” any of the current crop of tech giants. No offense to those of you who do, but I feel like I got it properly burned out of me in the late 90s when I started to realize that my hatred for Microsoft was laughably simplistic. I’ve become an admirer of Bill Gates and many of his works since then.

These companies are too enormous and complicated to be chalked up to something I can have a single strong emotion about. They aren’t worthy of either love or hate. I enjoy or value some things they do, wrinkle my nose at some others, and I’m mostly clueless about the rest. Even as a earnest industry observer and tech enthusiast (for decades), most of what they’re up to is just impossible for me to know, or it’s way over my head, or both, effectively beyond judgement. I have lost count of the number of times that my ideas about something one of the tech giants was doing got turned inside out by new and better information! There are usually about eight layers of “well, that changes everything” to discover about any given issue.

Most of the love and hate that people express for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, et al. boils down to marketing-powered brand loyalty and tribalism. If anything is actually worthy of contempt, it might be the ridiculous numbers of humans who are suckered into that unthinkingly. Do you really want to be defined by the logo on your smart phone? Or by your rejection of the logos on other peoples’ pocket brains? Almost everyone will say no! But many millions will continue to do so.