In 10 years people are going to look back on all this terrible art and wonder what the hell every tech company was thinking.
There's even a subreddit dedicated to hating the Alegria trend: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckalegriaart/top/?t=all
My mother worked as a photo-editor for a textbook publishing company many years ago and it was ridiculous how many meetings went into making sure they balanced the distribution of people that appeared in the books.
Everyone knows who the CEO and key executives are since they are visible at every product release.
It's not a literal take on the word faceless, there are faces, they're just not real. The real ones don't face you.
Buy a Mac, get it repaired, training etc. All in-store with an Apple employee.
No they don't. For a lot, sure. Most? No.
These people the interact with are part of the faceless attribute, they're usually pretty robotic interactions. But yes, they're a great part of Apple. To talk to a human.
>All in-store with an Apple employee.
They will usually say: "Okay let us take a look." and "Okay we took a look. You need a new X."
It's not the most faceless, but it is one of them. It's nearly impossible not to be faceless in this market.
Your description reminds me of another classic corporate clip-art style from the 90s, the infamous Microsoft "screen bean":
It's all about that fake outrage and fake pandering.
In the the 8 years that Adobe employed a similar style, starting in the mid 90s, it clearly managed to do so without even an inkling of diversity: http://splashscreens.sourceforge.net/acrobat.php Depending on the year you look at, the 90s version is less abstract than the current examples we're discussing here, but some years are actually more abstract. The lack of diversity is fairly clear to me regardless of that variation.
Of course, whenever we analyze abstract visuals, biases come into play. So maybe this read above is rooted in my own bias (either in favor of being able to make a point here, or in regards to how I believe a 90s corporation would portray "the business user"), but I think that's a stretch in most of these examples.
Unfortunately, they all seem to have elephantiasis instead.
i.e. not looking like people at all
It's analogous to how engineers across the english-speaking world simultaneously began using Docker or Hadoop or whatever. "Network effects".
It's popular because 1) it's cheap and easy to produce since it doesn't take much talent 2) it's easily vectorized and resizable 3) its color pallet and disproportionate human forms are supposed to make it feel universal.
Google copied Facebook, then a bunch of companies copied Google. And now finally Apple is onboard too. It's not a good look for Apple, which usually tries to create design trends, not follow them.
So we went from having Homer Simpson universal-color emojis, to a pallet of specific-color emojis, to be more inclusive. And then switched from stock photos of diverse people, to Homer Simpson cartoons, to be more universal.
We're just making this all up from year to year, aren't we?
There was a lot of discourse about it at the time. https://www.fastcompany.com/3016256/are-emojis-racist
I had viscerally negative reactions to those as a child. Nothing ever foreshadowed "this is not going to be fun" quite like those shirts & ties. Nor was it clear why one would need to juggle the world to open a text document. (Maybe it was all just a premonition about the malware that is CC.)
This is true for all things, which is why art and styles constantly change, and constantly repeat. Whatever they picked, that you would have been happy with, would have meet the same fate, and a younger you would have the same perspective of it as you do now.
It’s crazy to me that Reddit would be willing to go to that extreme to get people to download their app.