Sentiment is a tricky beast. It’s hard to capture, quantify, and interpret. We tend to dismiss it as a soft contributor to trading conditions, but a wobble in sentiment shakes broad markets and specific stocks. So, even with the caveat that it’s hard to break out of one’s echo chambers, and that the subject before us is seemingly as slippery as a jello-wrestling Jacob Zuma, it appears that we are deep in a pessimism trough when it comes to the ebb and flow of big tech sentiment right now.

As much as business, media and consulting firms – not to mention big tech itself – rave about the gains to be made in productivity, bottom lines, collaboration, and so on, there does seem to be a swelling wave of “techlash”.