Try to use any mainstream flagship tech product today. Most products work and feel pretty similar, with very minute differences in the UI, UX, and outputs they have. They all have similar UI elements, with the same animations and visual language optimised for your interaction. This all feels like a hyper-optimised monoculture, which is somewhat impersonal.
The companies that have defined the tech space in the modern era all used to have a unique, distinct personality, perspective, and culture, which shaped behaviour and their products, creating a competitive difference between their services that led to factions of users supporting certain cultures or perspectives. However, in the interest of serving shareholder expectations, all of these unique elements of pivotal tech organisations converged into a singular monolith chasing infinite optimisation of workflows, costs, and services.
This is more directly visible in the AI race as they have all arrived at the same place: an AI-first strategy, focused on outspending the competition to seem more competitive, and cutting headcount to preserve their own margins. All of this to invest and lead in a field that has no conflicting reports of ROI as verified by independent institutions.
This convergence is a cyclic phenomenon as explored by DiMaggio and Powell in 1983, who call it institutional isomorphism. This refers to the process by which organisations in the same field, facing the same pressures, gradually come to resemble one another regardless of the efficacy of their monolithic methods. They identified three mechanisms driving it.
Coercive isomorphism: External regulation or market pressure forces conformity;
Normative isomorphism: Shared professional education and networks produce shared assumptions about how things should be done
Mimetic isomorphism: Organisations facing uncertainty simply copy whoever looks most successful.
Through a combination of these processes, they argue that organisations end up chasing a goal to seem legitimate or secure by their internal and external shareholders rather than a goal of being efficient or innovative. Becoming structurally similar to other organisations creates a sense of safety and security both internally and externally, which counteracts the uncertainty and anxiety of being truly innovative, and is, in my opinion, the playbook of the consumer tech industry right now.
What they used to be
It is worth remembering that each organisation in big tech at one point had unique identities, not in a brand and marketing sense but in terms of their internal culture and approach to their visual identity, innovation frameworks, and product creation. This helped create more “human” products that may not have had the utility they have today, but were loved by consumers because they could feel the creativity, passion, and culture of the people who created them. It acted as a competitive advantage that tied consumers to companies if their perspectives and behaviours aligned with the organisation’s culture.
Also Read: Why Singapore’s deep tech founders need more than good science — and how National GRIP is filling that gap
Clifford Geertz, one of the great anthropologists of the twentieth century, argued that culture is not a set of rules or structures but a web of significance: a shared system of meanings that people create through symbols, rituals, and language, and within which all action takes place. He insisted that you cannot understand why people do what they do without first understanding what things mean to them in their particular context. Behaviour, stripped of its meaning, is just movement. Culture is what makes it legible.
By that measure, the early tech giants were genuinely distinct cultures, with their own symbols, rituals, and webs of meaning.
Google’s “Don’t be evil” is remembered now as naive, or hypocritical, or both, but the origin of the phrase is more interesting than its ending. In 2000, before a meeting with the Washington Post about monetising search, an engineer named Amit Patel walked into the conference room and wrote these words on the board because he was worried that Google might tell a media company their articles would rank higher if they paid for it, and it resonated with and was adopted by the rest of the organisation. The phrase was a symbol in the Geertzian sense: a condensation of meaning for an entire set of values about what the company was and was not allowed to become, and for a while, it actually organised decisions.
Facebook had a different kind of culture: “Move fast and break things” encoded a worldview that valued speed and disruption, and criticised caution, polish, and consensus. By understanding that worldview, all stakeholders understood what kind of person thrived in this culture and who failed. The IPO letter Zuckerberg wrote seemed to describe a social mission: We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. Whether or not there was any truth to it, it created distinct practices of innovation, culture, and product development, enshrined through ritual artefacts of the culture like the hackathons, the hacker ethos, and office layouts.
Apple embodies a culture of obsession with the “Think Different” campaign. Their obsession with a specific weight of trackpad, a specific shade of white, and the deliberate rejection of the fan all showcased their perspective and culture on what technology should be in relation to human life: subordinate, beautiful, invisible, and in service of the person rather than the engineer. The premium Apple commanded had nothing to do with benchmark scores. It came from the coherence of that meaning system.
These cultures were not perfect, and some were actively harmful. But they created distinct symbolic worlds, which meant employees inside each company knew how to act in the interests of the organisations, and consumers on the outside could read the difference, and chose to align with them in some cases.
How isomorphism erased them
Then, one by one, the symbolic worlds were flattened.
René Girard, French anthropologist and literary theorist, argued that human desire is not original, but mimetic. We do not independently decide what to want: we want what we see others wanting. This produces what he called the mimetic double bind: the more closely rivals imitate each other, the more intensely they compete, and the more indistinguishable they become in the process.
In the early years of the internet, the tech giants were differentiated enough that the mimetic dynamic was manageable. Google wanted to organise information. Amazon wanted to be the everything store. Facebook wanted to connect people. Apple wanted to make beautiful objects. These were genuinely different projects, and the competition between them was productive as each one was forced to excel on its own terms.
Also Read: Faster tech, slower brains: The biological blind spot of the AI race
But as the companies matured, the pressure for institutional legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell) combined with the pull of mimetic desire (Girard) to produce convergence. Wall Street rewarded certain behaviours like aggressive growth, margin expansion, and platform lock-in, and punished others, creating the coercive isomorphic pressure. The circulation of talent between companies, through elite MBA programmes and shared Silicon Valley professional networks, created normative isomorphism: a shared set of assumptions about how a serious technology company should operate, what metrics it should optimise, what a good quarterly report looks like.
The uncertainty of the technology landscape, in terms of figuring out which bet will pay off and which platform will win, being left behind. The new meta was focused on being similar to each other to be safe, or to let the start-up ecosystem innovate and then acquire and dismantle them for parts.
Google dropped “Don’t be evil” quietly in 2015, Facebook became Meta, and Amazon’s working culture became a liability in the press. The webs of meaning unravelled and were replaced by professional management practices, which have led to the current day, where you could swap the AI announcements from any of these companies, and nothing would feel different.
The Geertzian analysis is that these companies lost the ability to produce thick culture, which is the kind that gives behaviour its specific, locally intelligible meaning, and replaced it with thin culture: the universal focus on shareholder value, which means the same thing everywhere, and just monolithic cultures.
Differentiation still exists
The appetite for identity-led companies hasn’t disappeared; if anything, it seems to be growing with the coming of Gen Z, but it’s just being served at the margins.
Patagonia is the clearest non-tech example. Sustainability at Patagonia is not a marketing initiative. It is a core operating constraint and a value embedded deeply enough in the organisation’s culture that it shapes what products get made, how they get made, and how they get sold. When the founder transferred ownership to a climate trust, it was the logical conclusion of a meaning system that had been informing consumer choices and trust for decades. Consumers pay a premium because they can read the culture, and they agree with it.
In tech, modern examples are rarer. Nothing leads with a unique design philosophy and visual language, which has led to focused consumer attention and retention. Their use of transparent backs, a glyph interface, and a refusal to conform to the industry trends, alongside their open and honest communication in the smartphone and consumer audio space, has garnered them a sizable but fiercely loyal set of consumers.
Similarly, Teenage Engineering makes expensive, slightly impractical audio hardware for people who care about the relationship between aesthetics and function. Both command loyalty disproportionate to their market share. Both are, in Geertz’s terms, producing thick cultures rather than thin ones: you can read what they believe from the objects they make.
But neither has proven the model scales in the way Apple has.
Apple remains the only major tech company that has sustained something close to a genuine cultural identity, and its strongest recent act of identity was the M-series chip transition, followed by the MacBook Pro line. The move to ARM-based silicon was not an incremental update, but a platform-level rearchitecting of chip manufacturing and OS design on a platform that the rest of the industry had written off for high-performance machines.
They reignited the race in ARM computing and forced Windows on ARM, Chromebooks, Snapdragon, and Qualcomm, all to begin innovating and competing in a way that hadn’t happened in years. This innovation was one that came from a consistent, decades-long point of view about the relationship between hardware, software, and the place of the machine in the user’s life. That coherence in culture and their distinct identity is what makes MacBook users such a loud, loyal, and highest spending minority in the PC market.
Where the rest actually are
Other big tech organisations that have left behind their identities aren’t faring as well as Apple has.
Also Read: Why Apple’s MacBook Neo is subsidising the next generation of engineers
Google Search, the product that made the internet navigable and the one that Google built its identity on, is now widely regarded as being absolutely useless due to its advertising policies and the hyper SEO-optimisation dominating search results. Users append “reddit” to queries to reach human-written results. The AI-generated summaries at the top of the page hallucinate with regularity. The irony is that the company, which built its entire identity around the integrity of information, has a search product that people have learned not to trust.
Microsoft Windows has similarly become one of the largest pain points for its consumers, accumulating lots of harsh criticisms for its bloat and intrusive AI features while engineering resources flow toward Azure and Copilot. It started with the anger around the recall feature from a privacy standpoint, to a near-universal hatred for the Copilot integrations. The consumer product is tolerated rather than chosen, and at this point, even that is contestable, as recently they have, for the first time in a long time, begun to lose market share to not only macOS, but also to Linux.
What does this mean?
There is a particular kind of loss that is difficult to grieve because it arrives through entirely rational decisions. There was never a singular moment at any of these organisations where they decided to let go of their cultural and political identities. Each step along the way was seen as rational and defensible and as a reasonable response to growth.
The tragedy of isomorphism is that it doesn’t require villains. There is no singular decision or time that can be blamed for the hubris of these giants, but only institutional pressure and a need to appease their anxieties. It only constitutes organisations making locally “sensible“ decisions inside a system that produces globally homogenising outcomes.
What makes this truly difficult to reverse is that the tools available to large organisations in the form of restructuring programmes, cultural initiatives, leadership reviews, and others are themselves products of the professional management apparatus that isomorphism generates. You cannot rebuild a house with the sledgehammer that brought it down. The conditions that produce genuine cultural identity: conditions like urgency, collective beliefs, agility, and flexibility for small teams, and even the constrained, bootstrapped anxiety, all are slowly dismantled by isomorphism.
I do not want this article to at any point come off as an iliad of despair about the current state of technology. This is purely and simply just my observation stemming from an anthropological background, hoping to shed some light on what is happening, why it’s happening, and to incite discussions on how to tackle it.
These organisations are the same that built the internet as we know it. They did it, in part, because they had strange points of view that organised behaviour and made certain products inevitable. That strangeness was not incidental to their success, but integral to it, which unfortunately has been squandered. The only question that remains is to see whether these Goliaths will be able to crawl back up to their initial dreams, or will there be a string of Davids ready to eat their lunch.
In my next article, I will examine what happens when cultural homogeneity becomes a financial strategy, though tracing the AI bubble, the capital chasing it, and the companies building something real in the space the monoculture has left open.
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