A lot of companies are realising that for technology to be a competitive advantage it has to be more than just off the shelf. Banks are pushed this way partly due to regulatory pressure - they can't simply outsource their legal obligations or therefore the technology that implements them. But that's just an additional pressure pushing them that way. It's certainly not the only one. Nowadays lots of service companies are going this way.
I was talking to my boss the other day and he said that I was pretty modest compared to some of the programmers he'd dealt with at out sourcing firms over the years (they tried that first, it didn't end well), I think my response tickled him "I'm just a negative plumber with a keyboard, if I do my job right at this end shit doesn't come out the other".
I think the hubris of "We must do world changing things/disrupt everything" to provide tangible value is a by-product of the hype around the startup scene and 'entrepreneurs' (that is people who set out to be an entrepreneur first and figure out at what later).
I've never wanted that, I've only ever wanted to be compensated decently and work at a job where I can see measurable value in what I do, in my case that's writing production/factory management software that saves more money than it costs and makes the life of the end users more pleasant, it's also not particularly stressful and I go in at 9 and leave at 5 every day with complete technical freedom and time for that rarest of rare things, documentation.
After spending the last 5 years in high pressure, insane demand environments I'm never going back, I'll go do something else before I go back to that, it's simply not worth it (to me).
Netflix is clearly a "technology + entertainment" company.
The "technology" distinction isn't mutually exclusive with another vertical—exactly the opposite. Companies can outmaneuver competitors by applying "technology" to a specific vertical. The reason Netflix has been able to crush competitors is both because they get entertainment AND because they get technology.
The only pure "technology" companies I can think of are developer tooling products, or research labs.
Now, I'd be very much interested to see how the expenses and org makeup has shifted. I'd predict that much of their budget has been shifted to purchasing and producing content. The question then is, how much of their actual org is doing that work? Is that work outsourced? Are they merely spending money on contractors and production teams in LA/etc? Or is it in-house?
If they're outsourcing the actual content production, then I imagine it requires a small subset of the org to lead acquisition and curation of this content. Thus I'd lean towards saying they're still mostly a technology company. But if the vast majority of their budget is spent on content acquisition, then maybe it's more of a media production company at that point.
Another good heuristic for deciding what a company "is" is to look at the part of the business that once removed would redefine or cripple the business the most. What seems more valuable? A Netflix that only produces content that is then streamed through someone else that handles the technology? Or the Netflix of old that only streams content they had no hand in creating? Whatever's more valuable is most certainly the direction the business will go, and consequently gives you the framing for how the company would define itself.
What separates a traditional company from a tech company these days really just revolves around how much the company values tech. Do they have a CIO who goes to IBM and asks them to use cognitive computing to transform their business, or do they have engineers in house to build machine learning models to keep customers engaged with the company as a whole.
I dunno; netflix has nice tech, but it's hardly without competition. I don't think you could even consider their tech a differentiator for customers; they could switch onto whatever tech HBO uses and leverage their existing content without subscribers even noticing.
Every large company has a tech component. Why do you think outsourcing data analysis vs doing it in house changes how an outsider should evaluate the business? What matters are why people pay them.
The tech stack in itself can be cool for an engineer to work on, but business wise it has little value. The only way to progress in this market is to focus on content. That's what makes (or breaks) a service.
This is the crux of the matter. Why roll your own tech when you can buy off the shelf?
Off the shelf tech is, by definition, old tech. If you roll your own you can have a new feature, optimisation or bug fix in production the same day it comes out of QA. The lead time for vendor tech can be months, or even years. If you prioritise a new feature likewise you can have your devs working on it the same day it gets green lit. Try that with a vendor. Controlling your own technology stack, sometimes even developing your own dev tooling internally, can be a decisive competitive advantage.
I expect that a branded streaming-as-a-service platform will absolutely exist at some point relatively soon. But I'm not aware of examples today.
That said, I'll bet on the company with the content rather than the company with an incrementally whiz-bangier streaming platform.
Today it's less clear that the tech is still as compelling a differentiator relative to the content.
That's true generally, though. That doesn't distinguish "tech" companies from "non-tech" companies.
I disagree; subscribers would definitively notice if Netflix lost its global ISP-hosted dynamically-allocated caching network, for example: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
There's more tech than what's visible on the surface.
Netflix has 100M.
Furthermore, this is highly cacheable content. Again, netflix's tech is impressive, but at its core caching is a problem that has been solved and solved again. You aren't going to differentiate yourself by being a dumb pipe.
I highly, highly, highly doubt that netflix's tech is going to be a differentiating factor when people choose them so they can watch Kimmy Schmidt.
Netflix is a video/entertainment provider using newer technology to deliver better, faster and cheaper than others. The modernity of the technology is a spectrum that varies for each company and building-vs-buying to accomplish a goal has nothing to do with tech but is a tenant of running a business as old as the discipline itself.
Why are we supposed to care about this classification?
heh. This reminds me of "teams" where everyone is "qa" or everyone is a "developer". What's your mission if you're on the QA team? To QA all the things? That's not a mission.
What is a "technology" company's mission? It'meaningless. Technology is just a means to an end. Consumers don't buy technology - they buy products.
Netflix sells content. Using some cool tech, sure.
E.g. Is Uber a tech company or logistics. Is AirBnB tech or hospitality. Etc.