On Friday my friend Paul Crowe (of BNOTIONS) wrote the following Facebook post (rant) about the retail landscape here in Canada. It was a direct response to the claims that the recent loss of Target, Mexx, and Sony is “a warning sign for our economy.” If the text is too small below, you can also click here to read it on my wall.

I would say that competition did impact these retailers, but the key message remains the same: there’s nothing wrong with failure and companies going out of business (although success is obviously a more ideal outcome).

And it shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as a bad thing for our economy. In fact, a lot of the time it’s something quite healthy. When companies stop being competitive, the market is supposed to punish them. That’s how this game works.

According to a recent report called Building a Digital City, which I found via Fred Wilson’s blog, tech is now the second largest job sector in New York City behind financial services (which includes real estate). There are an estimated 262,000 tech workers in the city earning wages in excess of $30 billion.

This is a really interesting stat that speaks to the diversity of New York’s economy and the ability for it to continually reinvent itself. But what I found particularly interesting, was the following comment by Fred Wilson:

“And the reason tech is growing so fast in NYC is that it is embedding itself in all of these other industries. It’s not entirely clear to me whether Gilt is a tech company or a fashion/retail company, it is not clear to me whether ZocDoc is a tech company or a health care company, it is not clear to me whether Codecademy is a tech company or an education company.”

This is very much the way I think about so called tech companies today. I recently had a Rotman colleague say to me that he felt the startup world was becoming saturated. Everyone is now seemingly working on some new app.

But I like to think of it slightly differently. As Fred’s comment above suggests, a lot of startups today aren’t purely tech companies. They’re just out to solve a problem and it just so happens that technology and the internet are creating all sorts of opportunities for new solutions.

I also read a blog called Platform Connected and the author put it like this:

“In the future, every company will be a tech company. We already see this change around us as companies move to restructure their business models in a way that uses data to create value. We are moving from linear to networked business models, from dumb pipes to intelligent platforms. All businesses will need to move to this new model at some point, or risk being disrupted by platforms that do.”