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Talking with my roommate recently, we stumbled onto the topic of how in our society we often to want to bunch things into groups. We usually tend to use groups of two, but sometimes we’ll lend ourselves to the occasional three. We do this in politics, in sports, in video games and even in soda pop. The most interesting area in which we do this; however, is technology.

Whenever people talk of computers, it’s Microsoft vs. Apple, when it’s search engines, it’s Google vs. Yahoo, when we talk of internet service, it’s Comcast vs. Verizon, and when we discuss cell phones it’s Google vs. Apple. Very rarely do we ever consider the smaller bits of the whole sum, and this leads us to rooting for a specific company as if they were a sports team. It’s important to note also that often times we begin to show our fondness for a company when it’s on it’s way up — when it’s the “little guy.” We did this with Google and we did this with Apple.

However, as soon as they get too big or too cocky or begin to actually act like a big business acts, folks turn on them and crucify them as a monopoly. This interests me because we seem to be doing this to ourselves. It’s almost as if we can’t handle (or don’t want) more than a handful of competitors in any given business. What’s telling about it is that people seem to have this team mentality without actually being on the team.

When someone sees that my roommate owns an Android phone and that I own an iPhone, most of the time their first question is “which one is better?” My question to that is “how can one say which is better?” It’s all preference. Sure a product might have features that another does not, and we might not like the business practices of some companies, and some companies might be in bed with the government spying agencies, but when you get right down to it the important thing is whether or not a given product or service will be useful to you.

We’ve got better things to discuss than our allegiance to a company that doesn’t know we exist and doesn’t give two shakes about us. They’re in it for the money; every business is. Let’s keep our minds and wallets open, and our mouths shut, shall we?