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Comment by krustyburger | Hacker News Reader

I think FAANG is less useful as an abbreviation these days because it includes Netflix. I don’t think Netflix is guilty of much of anything sinister, at least by anyone’s reckoning except certain movie and tv studio executives.

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Virtually anybody but Hollywood exec types love Netflix, particularly creatives (the people who actually DO the things). Netflix has been making enormous amounts of content, even for smaller markets like Spain and betting on great people who are making really good shows (see ‘casa de papel’)

If you are a creative person you are enthused about streaming because suddenly there’s a huge amount of content being funded. Think about standup comedy and what Netflix has done for it.

Netflix is run by very smart people who are making very good content that most Hollywood execs wouldn’t touch. Scorcese’s next film is being funded by them! It’s nuts that Wolf of Wall Street, The Departed, multiple Scorsese projects were VERY HARD to fund. Jonah Hill worked essentially for the lowest money you can work for in a movie (SAG which is the actors union says 20k minimum) in Wolf of Wall St. Because they couldn’t afford him. Stuff that you look back and wonder “how the fuck?”

I don't understand why movies like The Wolf of Wall Street would be hard to fund. The talent i.e. DiCaprio, Jonah Hill etc are all great and known actors bound to make a movie succeed, especially DiCaprio. and Scorsese is also a well-known, successful director. Why would producers have any issues funding a movie for them?

Is it the controversial nature i.e. nudity etc that was the problem?

Movies are an insanely risky business if you look past the top blockbusters. And right now the blockbusters are almost purely superhero movies, remakes and reboots, so outside of that it's gonna be hard to get any funding.

Why does this read like an ad? I found Netflix content to be of really poor quality. It is a huge datamining machine that creates content based on the data gathered by it's user. I.e. if a lot of people watch TV series including cats and bank robbery thrilled. They will make a show mixing the two. No risk, no originality. Pure mindless entertainment based on algorithm productivism.

While that’s a good point, if the alternative is going around and using the acronym FAAG I think we can stick with the original.

This is the main reason Netflix is included in the group, I think.

GAFA?

GAFAM is what the french use which includes Microsoft [0].

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM

g-mafia

google, microsoft, apple, facebook, ibm, apple

But IBM isn’t that powerful in any direct way any more compared to other tech companies.

Oracle and rising powers like PayPal and Salesforce would make more sense. The latter companies still do a fraction of IBM’s revenue and profit. but they’re growing. I wouldn’t be surprised if their market caps are past IBM by now.

Unless IBM is being included because of the Red Hat acquisition.

Looks like they are included because their name starts with an I.

Microsoft isn't that powerful either. Windows is a small percentage of computing and Office simply isn't a big deal. They're also a pretty good company now.

“Microsoft. Microsoft had a market capitalization of US$ 904.86 billion for the first quarter of 2019, ranking as the largest company in the world. ...”

and that’s just the average. Today they’re a trillion dollar company. That’s 2x Facebook.

And yeah, ibm is included because it makes the mneumonic better.

Yep Microsoft are certainty valuable, they're just not influential. Like IBM or Oracle. Not like Apple, Google or Facebook.

Netflix is also tiny compared to the others. Its entire business is analogous to a single product of Amazon's (Prime video). Not only that but they're reliant on Amazon AWS for hosting.

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