Medium Tech? ⭐

In the 1980s, Sam Adams was a local phenomenon in the Boston area where I lived, and it was, at first, a novel outlier, a craft brewery in a world dominated by Big Beer. As a regular patron at Doyle’s Cafe in the Boston suburbs, I was familiar with Sam Adams early on, and there were fanciful rumors that the beer was delivered to the restaurant and bar from the local brewery underground in pipes.

Sam Adams didn’t stay local. It exploded in popularity in the 1990s as the country and then the world embraced so-called craft beers and the craft breweries that made them. This required its parent company, the Boston Beer Company, to acquire and build breweries around the country so that it could meet the demand more easily.

At some point, the Boston Beer Company crossed an all-defined line between being a craft brewery and just being an enormous company that made beer and other alcoholic drinks. Because of the explosive growth of Sam Adams and other bigger craft beers, the Brewers Association that oversees this market proposed changing its definition of what constitutes an American craft brewer. And that change meant that the company behind Sam Adams was no longer a craft beer maker.

The Boston Beer Company fought this change because being a craft beer maker was so central to its image. But it wasn’t just bigger than other craft brewers, it was getting as big as some Big Beer makers too, with national and international distribution and annual unit sales in the millions of barrels. This is no mom and pop operation anymore.

I don’t know a lot about the beer industry, nor do I care all that much. But I do know that it has endured a lot of consolidation in the last couple of decades, with obvious parallels to our industry. Big Beer today consists of just major companies—AB InBev, SABMiller, Heineken, and Carlsberg—that by some measures collectively control about 90 percent of the market. Meanwhile, 8 of the biggest companies in the world by market capitalization—Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, TSMC, Broadcom, and Meta—are Big Tech companies and each is dominant in its own way.

More to the point, we also have personal technology companies that straddle the line, or exist in a gray space, between Big Tech and Little Tech. These companies earn billions of dollars in revenue each year, so they are objectively “big” even though they’re not big enough, by any measure, to qualify as Big Tech. Likewise, some of them are even market leaders, and though none I can think of are outright dominating any important or big market, that confuses matters further.

What companies am I referring to? There are probably dozens or even hundreds of them, but the most obvious that come to mind are Spotify and Epic Games. None of these companies are on a list of the top 100 companies by market cap, where the smallest include Intuit, Qualcomm, and Intel. But they’re not Little Tech, right?

I don’t know. If you want to argue that anything that isn’t Big Tech is, by definition, Little Tech, there is perhaps a case to be made. But I think there is a large gap between Big Tech and Little Tech, and that one of the key differentiators isn’t so much size, though that matters, but rather propensity for abuse. That is, to me, a Big Tech company is big enough that it can enshittify its consumer and business offerings without fear of reprisal. These are companies that sort of have competition, but really don’t, and if there was real competition, they would behave differently. And so the only major recourse there is antitrust regulation.

Little Tech companies treat customers with respect because those people and businesses matter to them, are central to their identity but also to their relative success. They have many, many competitors in most cases. They may earn millions or even billions in revenues each year, but that competition is what holds back the Darwinian and inevitable enshittification that ruins the biggest and most dominant companies. These companies are real, they’re impacted by real market forces, and they act accordingly. We as consumers have what I could call a normal and healthy relationship with Little Tech companies, a real two-way, interactive experience in which each side values the other.

But what about this gray area, this … Medium Tech, lacking a better term?

It probably depends. The two examples I cite above have a few similarities aside from their relative sizes. For example, they were and still are both very engaged in changing Big Tech bad behavior through antitrust, either by petitioning regulators as Spotify did, to rein in some of Apple’s worst behaviors, or by taking them on directly in court and winning big, as Epic Games did with both Apple and Google. These companies are big enough, and have enough money, that they can afford to do these things and stand up for the little guys, including not just users but their Little Tech competitors, too. Few of which can afford to take this kind of stand.

But there are major differences too.

Spotify is the market leader in streaming music, and it has predictably raised prices and expanded into what I call “market adjacent” offerings like audiobooks and podcasts to keep the growth going. But it also controls less than 33 percent of the streaming music market and there is real competition from companies like Apple (abusing its gatekeeper status to gain an edge), Amazon Music, YouTube/YouTube Music, and others.

Epic Games is not a leader in any market, but it is one of several popular stores for PC games that in no way threatens Steam, and its Unreal Engine game development platform is a distant second to Unity. But Epic plays a major role in gaming, thanks in recent years to the success of Fortnite, and like Spotify it’s not a small company. It’s not Big Tech. But it’s big.

Ultimately, it probably doesn’t matter what we call these companies. I use the term Little Tech as a handy and obvious way to identify those companies one can trust. Yes, they’re small, that’s where the name comes from. But they’re also trustworthy. And that, to me, is more important than size. As is our vigilance as users because a company we trust could turn on customers at any time, enshittifying a product or service that we rely on.

Consider Sonos. I adopted Sonos because I wanted whole-house audio that bridged the major personal computing platforms and offered terrific sound quality and reliability. But after Google stole the Sonos technologies behind this success, the two firms engaged in a damaging legal battle and it’s no longer possible to control Sonos speakers directly from the Google music app, now called YouTube Music. Meanwhile, Apple and Sonos remain on normal if not friendly terms, and so Sonos speakers are natively compatible with Apple’s ecosystem through AirPlay. Sonos is not Big Tech and, yes, it was wronged by Google, which is. But as customer, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that this agnostic platform is no longer truly agnostic and that makes it less useful and usable for me and others who use Google products.

Worse, Sonos underwent its own mad bid for growth and plotted a massive product expansion that required it to overhaul its terrible app. Which it did by somehow creating an even more terrible app. The resulting backlash from customers should have been predictable, and could lead to the end of this small(ish) company. The CEO was ousted, the product roadmap was winnowed, and Sonos spent the past 18 months mostly just improving that new app so that it’s now only roughly as terrible as its predecessor. That’s not progress per se. But it also doesn’t solve the bigger problems with this company and its value proposition for customers.

Sonos’s new app is an abomination. But I would still include Sonos on the list of Little Tech companies if it weren’t for the Google issue. That is enshittification by any measure because forcing users to use a terrible app is unacceptable, and I can avoid that only on Apple devices.

But Spotify and Epic Games? Here, we have the opposite problem. They’re too big to be considered Little Tech, if only by revenues or audience size. They are, in effect, the Sam Adams of personal technology, neither Big nor Little. But they are good or bad to customers in ways that matter.

I think it’s notable that there is absolutely some enshittification to Spotify, key among that its incessant price increases. But it is also playing a positive role keeping Big Tech companies like Apple at bay. It’s complicated.

Epic Games is less complicated. Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney is controversial, for sure, but his work bringing Big Tech to heel, and at such great cost, is one of the greatest gifts we’ve ever received, and that’s true whether your play Fortnite and use the Epic Games Store or not. We owe him and Epic Games so much. And yet Epic Games is still too big to be called Little Tech.

But again, it may not matter. If you accept that this is really about trust, and I think it is, then that trumps size and whatever labels we find convenient. I don’t trust (or use) Spotify, but my family does. I do trust Epic Games and, thanks to my shift to PC gaming a few years back, I use its game store a lot. It’s where I bought Battlefield 6, for example.

Which companies you trust will vary by individual. I see issues in certain companies, products, and services that make those things non-starters for me, but others may not. That’s fine. This is about trust, and I think that’s the best way to think of these companies.

This is a bit hazy, but to my mind, Little Tech is inherently trustworthy. Most of Big Tech is not. And we have to take the rest of this world, that gray area between the two, on a case-by-case basis. We will disagree on a lot of this. But it doesn’t matter. We all need to do what’s right for us, and that will always vary by person.