‘Technology’ Is the Most Useless Word in the English Language
As the term has expanded to include companies of almost every description, it’s lost its descriptive value.
Has the descriptor “technology” exhausted its usefulness? Facebook, DoorDash, and Qualcomm are all, in day-to-day parlance, tech companies. But they’re very different businesses. The first earns its money by selling advertising space, the second is a food delivery business, and the third makes semiconductors. Facebook and DoorDash have heaps of proprietary software, but Qualcomm is the only company whose actual product is technology.
It’s become a catchall that companies are all too willing to co-opt if it lends some luster. There are now manifold offspring: adtech, biotech, cleantech, fintech, foodtech, proptech, and more. As each subsumes the industry it serves, perhaps we can start to drop the “-tech” suffix.