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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

Technology isn't just an industry - it's a way of doing things and is becoming ubiquitous. When people think "tech" they may think of sharing status updates or searching for a restaurant. What about driverless trucks (transportation), gene sequencing (healthcare), industrial robotics (manufacturing), automated warehouses (retail), solar research (energy), farm-specific yield optimization (agriculture)?

This stuff is all being driven from within the tech industry, even when it will benefit "other" industries.

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I think one problem with this discussion is what is encompassed by "tech". If you just use "tech" as an abbreviation for "technology", then sure, tech has been driving human civilization for millennia. Agriculture? Buildings? Roads? Language? Writing? Man, those are some technologies that have paid off big time.

If by "tech", you mean "high tech", well, that encompasses an awful lot of different things, and of course the goalposts are constantly moving as today's high-tech becomes tomorrow's tech becomes the next day's obsolete.

If by "tech" you mean computer hardware, software, networking, and networked services, then sure, that's a pretty important driver of some other advances, but likewise advances in other fields help to drive this as well. Globalization, shipping, mining, energy, RF engineering, photonics, aerospace, and so on all play into this, and all both benefit from and contribute to the success of computer hardware, software, networking, and networked services. But just because this form of high tech can help with other fields, doesn't mean it's driving the economy. It may be increasing productivity to a certain degree, but there is an awful lot of the economy which is only minimally influenced by these kinds of things.

I think the point the previous commentator was trying to make is the distinction between the 'tech industry' a la Silicon Valley versus other industries - and it would be unfair to credit the former with any innovation in the latter. Pretty much every industry since we have invented fire has grown through advances in 'tech'. So what makes a firm a 'tech' firm - in this day and age it's hard to say, and I'm not sure if it's a useful exercise.

A "tech" company is a company that provides a good or service that is either completely new and only possible because of a technological innovation, or is a new company providing an existing service using a different vertical stack based on technology which came available after the incumbents were started.

Uber is a "tech company" because as they are providing a new business model for a livery service based on using an application to make a market that is distinct from the previous market.

Facebook is a "tech company" because they are providing a business model around sharing information between acquaintances (a social network) using an application and a web site.

Fedex is not a tech company as they are augmenting but not replacing their model or their processes. Foster Farms is not a tech company as they have not fundamentally changed the way in which they raise chicken.

I go back and forth on Tesla or SpaceX. Consider Tesla, they are a car company but electric cars have been around forever, their most successful incarnation, the Golf Cart, has dominated golf courses for decades. It wasn't the "idea" or the "product" that made the Roadster and then the Model S successful, it was the execution on the vision. Similarly SpaceX rockets are just rockets with better execution and better alignment with available technology.

It is a strange, strange world in which Uber is considered "tech" but turning around a rocket after it's boosted a payload toward orbit and then landing it back on earth exactly where intended isn't technologically innovative enough to qualify.

> A "tech" company is a company that provides a good or service that is either completely new and only possible because of a technological innovation, or is a new company providing an existing service using a different vertical stack based on technology which came available after the incumbents were started.

That's such a vague definition and one could seemingly fit every company into being a "tech" company if they wanted to. How do you unilaterally define something that is "completely new"? What precisely is a technological innovation? Isn't the iPhone not "completely new", since we had palm pilot and blackberry before it? Is a personal computer considered "completely new" even when mainframes existed before? How do you draw the line between a laptop that has a touch screen (but still has a keyboard) and one that is just a touch screen (iPad Pro for example)?

I would argue FedEx is a tech company. Creating and shipping labels can be done via the FedEx API, and pickups can be arranged too, like Uber. The supply chain solution is so good that companies can keep very low inventory of high value goods. Drivers use software to optimize routes (eg no left turns in US). I believe software is a very important part to keeping FedEx efficient.

But your other examples made a lot of sense to me.

Great discussion. What I was trying to capture was the difference between businesses that wouldn't be possible without the tech they are using and businesses which could operate but would perhaps be less efficient or perhaps less profitable. I certainly agree it is an arbitrary distinction and one which has been debated literally for decades in the SF Bay Area at least.

But I don't think that being arbitrary makes it invalid, the goal is simply to put a stake in the ground so that the conversation can move forward. One of the challenges of having discussions about tech bubbles or tech economies is agreeing on what companies are considered (by the speaker) to be tech companies, and which are not. Then the listener can translate that into their own set of companies and look past the definitional challenge and then on to the meatier question of the role of technology in the economy and the businesses that are currently considered valuable by that economy (or not).

A better definition might be, how much revenue (measured % of sales) does this firm reinvest back into R&D?

Let's try a few examples: P&G: Not a tech company. They spend tons of money on advertising to get products on shelves and on TV that tons of Americans buy. They can innovate in packaging and distribution, but honestly not that much.

Tesla: tech company. Spending tons of R&D. I don't know how much, but it's a lot.

Pepsi: Not a tech company.

Your local grocery store: tight margins, probably not a tech company.

AmaGooFaceSoftPle: Billions/yr on new product development. Tech companies for sure.

This search gives a nice summary of P&G's supercomputing-driven research:

https://www.google.com/search?q=procter+and+gamble+high+perf...

It's not just packaging and distribution. Now it's fair to point out that P&G spends less on R&D than tech companies, but it's not zero.

In all deference to what you're trying to say... I'd submit that most companies are tech companies.

Biggest example is Goldman Sachs. Their CEO came out and said "We're not an investment bank anymore, we're a tech company." Their rationale is that they have to use technology to defeat their competitors--before their competitors can use technology to defeat them.

All the tech he mentioned in the conventional industries are being driven by fundamental changes in the "conventional" tech space. Smartphone market dropping price of mobile computing, cloud-connected robotics deployed across manufacturing floors, all ideas that became mainstream in SV. So, where do you draw the line?

Following this reasoning you could say that accounting is ruling the world, because accountants are needed in any company, no matter their size or industry. The reality is that in many industries technology is an important and even essential tool, but it is does not replace that industry. This is true is energy, banking, general services industry, manufacturing, etc.

I actually do agree with your idea that accounting is ruling the world, especially when it comes to creative accounting, mergers and acquisitions, IPO's.

Any Tech company, facebook and apple included, has a ton of accounting DNA when it comes down to the nuts and bolts - how to pay their employees, how their stock compensation is structured, and even how the founder keeps control of the company.

Accounting really is taking over the world - in every single industry, tech / high - tech included.

It's not all being "driven" per se from within the tech industry. For example, John Deere is making huge advances in agricultural equipment that's going somewhat unnoticed in Silicon Valley -- but these are combines that can leave a 3-inch overlap between passes rather than a 18-inch overlap, because they are GPS-guided, for example... this is adoption of technology, but it's being driven by John Deere, and will show up as growth in the industrial equipment sector, not the high-tech sector.

These industries see software as a means for their products, not something that they excel at.

Anyone that has worked in these industries knows how they usually don't care about whatever best practices are touted in tech conferences.

They only want something that delivers business value, regardless how the code looks like.

That may be true for products from the industrial era where the end user isn't directly affected by software.

Companies that want to keep customers (in some cases keep customers alive [cars 'n shit]) are going to have to start caring about software as it becomes the conduit for every interaction their customers have with their products. It's not just social networks that are getting funded now—it's companies that build the previous poster's top five drivers of the US economy. I believe you have to call pretty much any company in those verticals tech companies to some degree.

Not at all. Companies have a need for all kinds of services unrelated to their main purpose. Technology is just another service. In many cases it is important for them to have software departments, but that has been true for a long time. For example, banks have for more than 30 years relied on technology departments to do business. For all this, banking hasn't become part of the tech industry, and never will because this is not their purpose.

Technology is "just another service" in the modern economy like oxygen is just another element found in our atmosphere.

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