Sweaty, desperate, and sad: Big Tech is giving off divorced dad energy

Let’s be clear, the tech industry was never cool cool. Starting sometime around 2000, Silicon Valley’s ability to deliver new products that actually improved our lives gave it a new cultural cache — at least for a time, the industry was like the cool, interesting person that people wanted to be with, who listened and built things that people actually wanted. Things came easily, and tech’s valuations skyrocketed as companies “disrupted” incumbent businesses.

Smart people wanted to work at these companies to tackle the world’s most intractable problems, and average Americans began to integrate the best solutions into their everyday lives. It seemed like every new idea opened up a new market worth hundreds of billions of dollars — smartphones, social media, cloud computing, software development solutions. Liquid capital, growing market dominance, slick ads, and fawning media made it easy for giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon to expand their footprint and grow their bottom lines.

Yet, like any decaying relationship, these companies got lazy, entitled, and demanding. They started to care less about the foundations of their business — like having happy customers and stable products — and more about making themselves feel better by reinforcing their monopolies. By around 2015, tech’s cool-dad period had ended. After reaping the rewards of various hyper-growth ideas, the industry’s growth promises began to get ahead of its ability to innovate. Silicon Valley became addicted to acquisitions, buying the new, hot toy that it figured everyone would like instead of thinking through what Americans actually needed. Instead of doing the work to get better, tech has remained steadfastly attached to the tropes that worked when its products were at their prime. The industry has become a bloated, surly divorced dad who refuses to do the hard work and look inward to find real solutions.

The biggest players in tech are dyeing their gray hairs, starting a band with their equally middle-aged friends, throwing on a leather jacket or new chain (sometimes literally), and trying anything to pretend that they’ve “still got it” — anything other than focusing on building important and meaningful products that users actually want. Big Tech has decided the way to keep customers isn’t to compete or provide them with a better service but instead make it hard to leave, trick customers into buying things, or eradicate competition so that it can make things as profitable as possible, even if the experience is worse. Great companies are able to accept their limitations and acknowledge that nobody has to be your customer, but giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon refuse to accept that they can’t do everything and that their problems are a direct result of the kind of lack of introspection and cultural laziness that breaks relationships. Customers have spent the past 30 years sharing their precious data and money with tech companies, but Silicon Valley’s new divorced-dad energy may finally push users to pack up the car, take back custody, and leave the toxicity behind.

As with all failed marriages, the first sign that the tech industry was letting America down came many years before the eventual breakup. After two decades of consistent internal innovation, Big Tech got addicted to acquisitions in the 2010s: Apple bought Siri; Meta bought WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus; Amazon bought Twitch; Google bought Nest and Motorola’s entire mobility division. At first, this spending spree was cheered on by a society that had yet to grow suspicious of tech, applauding Amazon and Meta (then Facebook) for finding new ways to expand business and get more users. But over time, the acquisitions made it impossible for these companies to focus on delivering the features we needed. (And eventually got them in legal hot trouble, as Monday’s antitrust ruling against Google’s search practices showed.) Big Tech companies became less known for one particular product. Instead, they offered a sprawling suite of different interconnected products that all kind-of-sort-of worked while effectively printing money.

Tech companies and average Americans knew that just snapping up smaller startups wasn’t going to cut it. Eventually, people needed something real — something on the scale of Google Search, Facebook, or the original iPhone, something that changed how we interacted with others, that made our lives richer and cooler and more vibrant, or at least a little easier. But after a few years of coasting, Silicon Valley couldn’t deliver. Instead, Big Tech became obsessed with a series of half-baked boondoggles that seemed revolutionary, yet in practice, were either not reliable enough to be trusted or simply not that useful.

Tech’s promises vastly outpaced software and hardware’s ability to actually drive value

The shiny distractions were plentiful: Virtual reality would have a brief time in the sun, with Oculus Rift popularizing the concept until it became obvious that the technology was little more than a niche gadget with extremely variable results depending on who used it. Augmented reality was briefly exciting, with an incredible-looking demo from a company called Magic Leap that inspired a short funding craze along with an even briefer hype cycle around Google Glass. Self-driving cars were all the rage after Tesla launched its lane-keeping “autopilot” software in late 2015, and Elon Musk promised that “every new Tesla would drive itself” by 2017. Years later, Musk has not delivered, and autonomous vehicles are still struggling to catch on outside a very select set of use cases. Then there was the agonizing dalliance with cryptocurrency and the useless puffery of the metaverse.

There’s a consistent theme behind all of these movements — tech’s promises vastly outpaced software and hardware’s ability to actually drive value. Autonomous cars are possible but require an incredibly large amount of training data, and even then, they make egregious and at times fatal decisions, making it difficult to trust them. While we figuratively might love the idea of being in a virtual world, our expectations are such that we’d want a full-sensory experience rather than a clunky headset, and without full immersion, things feel off. Augmented reality has cool ideas, but what consumers want is something that magically projects in front of them — any physical encumbrance or clunky menu system shatters the illusion. In all of these instances, tech companies tried to growth hack their way into a new, multibillion market while they let the core products — the very thing that had made us fall in love with them in the first place — wither away. It’s all so terribly divorced — ignoring long-term problems in favor of shiny baubles that make them feel good and make vacuously informed investors fall in love with them, failing to accept that the reason people are so down on the tech industry is that its core products are getting worse as a means of making investors more money.

Big Tech has become sullen, entitled, and lazy, believing that nobody else could snatch away its precious customers. So these companies, brimming with overconfidence, are doing less and less to try to delight customers, unable to see how every selfish move is pushing the most important people away.

Perhaps the uber-example of Silicon Valley’s new divorced-dad energy is the gratuitous waste that is the latest AI hype cycle. The industry has collectively sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into an unprofitable technology with massively overstated abilities, which Goldman Sachs’ head of equity research, Jim Covello, has argued is “not capable of solving complex problems.” In spite of these glaring problems, Big Tech is forging ahead, trying to convince Americans that it’s different this time and AI really is the thing that will change their lives. Generative AI is the tech industry’s leather jacket, and GPUs are the Porsche. Rather than focusing on the next frontier of computing, Big Tech wants to take the big, sexy, fancy, easy route — throwing more money at the latest shiny thing in the hope that it fixes all its problems.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai proudly stated that he believes AI in search creates value for users, even as Google’s AI-powered search tells users to put glue on their pizza. Meta, unable to reconcile its total lack of innovation in any part of its business, instead chose to let Facebook get flooded with AI-generated spam that it seems unwilling to deal with because it’s profitable in the short term — ignoring the bigger problem that Facebook’s traffic has dropped by more than 25% in the past few years.

Generative AI is the tech industry’s leather jacket, and GPUs are the Porsche.

Amazon has only ever lost money on its devices, and while Microsoft might have acquired Github to “heighten Microsoft’s focus on open-source development” and is happy to boast that 40% of Github’s revenue comes from its AI-powered copilot, it’s a flimsy boast to make it feel good about itself. Even customers who have had a dalliance with the new divorced-dad version of Silicon Valley have been grossed out — some customers who have tried out new AI tools have been disappointed in their capabilities and quickly ended their contracts. It doesn’t matter that generative AI isn’t making anyone money or that it’s making companies like Google and Microsoft raise their emissions by more than 30% over the past five years, it’s getting attention and drawing investor dollars, so it’ll do for now.

Even when tech companies aren’t trying to shove AI down our throats, they fall into a similar trap. Apple, unwilling to be seen as behind the times, rushed out its Vision Pro headset to prove to the markets that it could make new things. The only problem: The VisionPro wasn’t ready for prime time. It clearly needed a few more years of development to make it lighter, easier to use, and less prone to giving you a headache.

Tech’s increasingly divorce-vibed executives are scared of doing the hard, transformative work because it requires investing massive amounts of time and energy in developing new inventions with clear use cases in everyday life or fixing the core products that they’ve left to decay. Pichai shouldn’t be excited about AI in search — he should be doing the hard work to fix the cultural and incentive issues that ruined the existing Google Search. Satya Nadella shouldn’t be shoving billions into artificial intelligence but trying to build a meaningful improvement to Microsoft Windows or investing in internal security services instead of outsourcing it to growth-at-all-costs partners like CrowdStrike. Amazon is, at this point, a $50 billion logistics company with a massive cloud-computing business tacked on. Instead of investing in making its workers and customers happier, it’s let the quality of products offered on the platform collapse and treated its workers and clients like crap. But all of that is much harder than just buying some half-baked chatbot and sloppily plugging it in, so here we are: getting AI pushed on us in a desperate attempt to win us back.

Like the collapse of any marriage — amicable or otherwise — tech’s great divorce from their end users is the result of a disconnection from the reason they built their companies in the first place, back when things mattered more, back when they felt that they had to earn people’s love and respect. Now Big Tech firms are cobbled-together masses of people from different companies acquired at different times, with no clear vision and little cultural unity. Much like people get married, grow old, stop having date nights, stop paying attention to each other and to the little things, Big Tech has simply forgotten what matters: the customer at the end of the transaction — and instead has fallen into a parasitic relationship with them, where customers have to stay because leaving would be painful, annoying, and so much work.

When the public eventually walks out, I don’t believe Big Tech is even capable of making the adjustments necessary to win them back.

And once tech’s divorce truly happens — when things really begin to fall apart as companies realize they have no more hyper-growth markets — it will be so much harder for them to fix things. Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple are simply no longer forces for innovation, and when the public eventually walks out, I don’t believe Big Tech is even capable of making the adjustments necessary to win them back. The “work” in question here likely requires some actual creative destruction — the “disruption” that tech used to be famous for — which in turn will likely break up one or a few of the largest tech companies.

Instead of doing the kind of introspection necessary to please average people, they’d rather paper over their problems with ideas like generative AI — a big, noisy, and superficially impressive doodad that makes them feel cool for a minute but only makes them feel bad when they drive it back to their empty, featureless apartment. Generative AI is the biggest, dumbest attempt that tech has ever made to escape the fallout of building companies by acquiring other companies, taking their eyes off actually inventing things, and ignoring the most important part of their world: the customer.

And, like any divorce, lawyers will make a great deal of money either way.

Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business public-relations agency. He is also the author of the tech and culture newsletter Where’s Your Ed At and the host of the “Better Offline” podcast.