When you visit the Dell website, the first thing they force you to decide is whether you are a Home, Small Business or “Enterprise” business customer. At one point, the thin and light laptops were only available in the Enterprise section—perhaps plebs and small businesses are judged unworthy of appreciating the finer things in life, unlike the kleptocrats who run large corporations. We hoi polloi presumably should be content with our fate and make do with last year’s (decade’s?) technology.

When you search for products on Amazon, you have to select a “Department” to enable sorting by price. What do I care whether a microfiber cloth was filed under “Automotive” or “Electronics”? Taxonomies are inherently subjective, a fact librarians know well, but is surprisingly poorly understood outside the field.

Both cases illustrate what happens when a self-centered organization puts its internal structure and implementation details ahead of its customers.