UpTrajectory Review

A veteran technology journalist with two decades of experience has publicly broken ranks with the industry's booster culture. After years of championing new devices and software through his Network World column and Today in Tech podcast, he now argues that technology companies have stopped asking whether their products genuinely improve lives. Instead, they push innovations into workplaces and homes with unclear benefits while harvesting personal data and exploiting user emotions for corporate gain. This shift represents a fundamental change in how one of tech's own chroniclers views the industry's relationship with its customers.

For small-business operators, this critique cuts close to home. Every software vendor, cloud provider, and platform company now competes for your budget with promises of transformation, efficiency, and competitive advantage. Yet the piece suggests these companies increasingly tell you what you need rather than listen to what you actually want. The hidden benefits often flow to the vendor through data collection, lock-in, or algorithmic manipulation. If you've ever felt pressured to adopt a tool because the vendor's roadmap demanded it rather than your business case justified it, this columnist is naming your experience.

What makes this significant is the source. This is not an outsider or critic looking in, but a longtime industry voice who built his career explaining technology's benefits to business users. His disillusionment carries weight because he spent years on the other side of the conversation. The piece also broadens the critique beyond the current AI frenzy, arguing that the problem predates large language models and extends to social media's effect on discourse, attention economics, and the concentration of decision-making power among a handful of technology executives. We agree with his core point: the burden of proof has shifted wrongly to customers to justify skepticism rather than vendors to justify change.

The downstream effects for business owners are concrete. When technology companies prioritize their growth metrics over user outcomes, operators absorb the costs through forced migrations, deprecated features, pricing changes, and tools that extract value rather than deliver it. Employees face workflow disruptions driven by vendor strategy, not workplace need. Small businesses, lacking dedicated IT procurement teams, often feel these shifts hardest because they have less leverage to negotiate terms or resist platform changes. The columnist's call for harder questions is ultimately a call for operators to reclaim agency in technology decisions.

Watch whether other industry voices follow his lead or whether the economics of tech journalism, heavily dependent on vendor advertising and access, drowns out this skepticism. For operators, the actionable response is straightforward: before your next technology purchase or renewal, ask the vendor to demonstrate specifically how the tool improves your operations, not how it advances their vision. Request clarity on data practices, algorithmic decision-making, and exit costs. If a vendor cannot answer without buzzwords or platitudes, that silence is your answer. The columnist spent 20 years believing technology's promise. His warning deserves your attention before you sign the next contract.

“The tech industry now seems more interested in telling us what we need than listening to what we want.” — Computerworld

Takeaway: Before your next technology purchase, demand the vendor prove how it improves your operations, not how it advances their roadmap.