Dear John – I mean Tim,

We have to talk.

We have had a lot of wonderful times together. You were my first – way back in 1985 when I was still in high school. Since then we have spent so much time together: so many late nights, early mornings, walks in the park, trips, moves, seasons of life, times spent crying over the spilled milk of life.  It is hard to see my life without you in it.

But you have changed.

When this started we were both young, naïve, and new to this world. When my friends were all PC, we were pounding out papers in MacWrite, using a mouse to draw in MacPaint, and playing games on those 3-1/2 inch discs that did not fit my friends’ computers.

Years later I put 10,000 songs in my pocket, sold my favorite guitar to buy a blueberry iMac, and bought a revolutionary device that was a phone in name only. When I started a business my first dollar was spent buying a MacBook Pro.

It was perfect. We understood each other and as I grew, you kept pace, blossoming with each new phase of our relationship. We had our troubles, but it was those troubles that formed our bonds.

But recently you have become distant and distracted. It started when you messed with my photos, then my documents, and now with my music. All you can talk about is “cloud” this and “family sharing” that, but instead of improving the situation each interlinked device keeps getting cut off and I can never access what I want where I want to.

All of this is supposed to free up memory and help make everything more accessible, but anything that I clear by paying for your services is still somehow blocked. And your operating systems keep bloating to absorb what little space I had to start with.

And then there is my kids. You addict them with your Siren-screen while stubbornly refusing to give me the tools to manage their access. Oh, sure, I can disable my Apple Watch if someone steals it, but I cannot set a time limit on my kids iPhones, or iPods? And yes, I do blame you that there is not a good app available that handles this.

Everything in this digital world looks amazing on television, but it breaks down – usually literally – when I try to use it in real life. I mean, it is wonderful that Siri has a pre-programmed funny joke when I ask her to divide by zero, but when I am driving and I want to call someone, she can barely retrieve half of my contacts, she can never quite tell me what time the shop I am heading to is closing, and her ability to read and take dictation is abysmal.

When I brought you into a meeting, I was a rebel. When I dragged you around the world, we were inseparable. When you carried me through my EMBA we were cohorts. You used to make my life more seamless but now if feels like we are growing apart.

I really should tell you: there is someone else.

They are not you, but they are getting closer. They are harmonizing my devices the way you used to. They are making my life easier the way you used to. They are anticipating my needs the way you used to. I know I am abnegating my privacy to gain convenience, but at least they deliver that convenience.

You have always been special to me.   It was your cute little flaws that made you enticing. It was always different with you which made it both exciting and frustrating, but never dull. These days you just seem bored and stiff, going through the motions.

When you have finally been caught doing what we always knew you did it makes it hard to overlook everything else. I feel betrayed because you want to be everyone’s favorite. In doing so, you are making too many sacrifices.

I finally gave in to your demands and upgraded both my iOS and Mac OS. The upgrade upended my iPhone and hard-crashed my Air. I did not need any new features, and now that I have recovered I can report no difference from before, except neither device works as well. I was just trying to make you happy so you would stop begging me to “upgrade.”

If you are listening, stop chasing everyone else and remember that you are the one in the lead. Be better. Get back to integrating and striving for the next thing rather than the next dollar.

Henry Ford once said, “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits.  They will be embarrassingly large.” Henry Ford never set out to make cars. Instead, he set out to provide a service by making transportation affordable. You need to find your way back to identifying what service you provide.