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Comment by tech-historian | Hacker News Reader

The article is an interesting history lesson, but that sub-heading at the top sort of threw me for a loop, referring to Microsoft as "the first big tech company"

Microsoft was, and still is, a giant tech company starting in the 90's and on. But if one looks at the digital corporate landscape back in the 1980s, IBM was an absolute behemoth. Consider this. In 1985, IBM had a market cap of $95 billion. That was more than the next 13 largest tech companies at the time, combined! This other group includes Apple, HP, Hitachi, Intel, Motorola, Sony, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Verizon, Xerox, National Semiconductor, DEC, and Control Data.

It's hard to overstate how powerful IBM was at its zenith.

I only know this because I was curious and looked up the data the other day, and it blew me away.

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The word "tech" itself changes every decade or so. Agriculture was considered "tech" at one point of time. The companies you listed are all "electronics tech" while Microsoft is purely "software tech" which is the prevalent definition of tech today.

Except for all the hardware they make.

It's only been a recent trend, and it's more to experiment with new form factors and nudge the PC ecosystem in right direction more than anything else.

And the recent trend is for software companies to start making their own hardware (AWS making Graviton, Echo products,and Google making TPUs, Pixel) while hardware companies move into software (Apple moving into Apple Music, TV, News).

Clearly Microsoft's focus is on software. But I think you'd be surprised how early they started producing hardware. Back in 1980 they had huge successes in hardware! Starting with the Z80 Softcard and Ramcard.

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

Exactly, there's not much recent about them doing hardware, but if you don't know the history and only look at the past 10 (or so) years which is in some ways understandable, then indeed it could look like e.g. the Surface line is 'MS recently doing hardware'

Let’s not forget about the Xbox

Apple has always been in software, the move you mentioned is more services

> It's only been a recent trend, and it's more to experiment with new form factors and nudge the PC ecosystem in right direction more than anything else.

> And the recent trend is for software companies to start making their own hardware (AWS making Graviton, Echo products,and Google making TPUs, Pixel) while hardware companies move into software (Apple moving into Apple Music, TV, News).

Define recent? The Xbox came out in 2001, and they were working on media players before then I believe.

If “purely software tech” were the definition of tech today, that would leave out Apple - mostly a hardware company by revenue - and Amazon - half of which is a retail company shipping physical goods.

IBM was also a software giant. People railed against IBM as they later did against Microsoft: the big player in town, which monopolized everything and whose evil hands seemed everywhere. Likewise, managers felt safe with IBM (like they later did with Microsoft): "nobody was ever fired for buying from IBM" was a well known saying.

IBM was the omnipresent giant before Microsoft became one. It's really hard to overstate this.

> Agriculture was considered "tech" at one point of time.

And it still is... agritech is a very interesting field!

It's a good point about the definition of tech. I was trying to refer to digital tech companies. But certainly as you go back in time, tech applies to so many industries before the digital age. Automotive, photography, industrial equipment, aviation, chemical engineering, materials science, etc etc all could be thrown into the technology umbrella, so it's important to make a distinction.

Do "tech company" and "technology company" have different meanings?

Only to pedants, but they're wrong.

Microsoft is not software only, and tech doesn't only mean software as far as I understand it. Or would you say Tesla isn't a technology company?

I'm not sure if this is intentionally obtuse, but yes "tech" as a slang term doesn't mean "technology", it describes a type of company largely known for the prowess and scale of their user-facing software. This includes such entities as Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon, but is not inclusive of course.

Tesla, on the other hand, clearly produces technological artifacts - quite impressive ones, at that - but they are not a "tech" company within the colloquial context you've stumbled into

It must be very context specific; I'm in IT, in an English-speaking country (Toronto,Canada), and don't even remotely think of "Tech" as "front-end user-facing software only". :-/

What kind of companies do you call "tech" companies then? I can't really understand the objection I'm facing, when people tell you their stock portfolio is heavy in tech do you really think companies other than the one I listed? I live in the Bay Area so maybe things are skewed to "local" companies but I held a similar opinion when I was still in Canada too...

EDIT: Just to hammer it home, search "is faang tech" and weep that "corporatefinanceinstitute.com" is on my side

of course faang is tech. Your assertion was not "faang is tech" it was "faang is all that tech consists of". These are not equivalent, and I recommend you view [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

EDIT: Just to hammer it home, view [2] and weep that money.usnews.com is on everyone else in this discussions side.

[2] https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/slidesh...

To everyone else in this thread, sorry for feeding the trolls.

> I'm not sure if this is intentionally obtuse, but yes "tech" as a slang term doesn't mean "technology", it describes a type of company largely known for the prowess and scale of their user-facing software. This includes such entities as Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon, but is not inclusive of course.

Except I would argue that Apple is known more for its hardware than its software.

Also, I believe most people don't give a second thought to Netflix's software. It's the content they think about first.

I'm under 35, and would consider tech to include both hardware and software.

By your description, a company running a 5G network but no user facing software would not be described as tech. Surely you can't mean this.

That's exactly the distinction I was making. Do you call Ericsson a tech company? I certainly never hear them in that bundle.

Again, "tech" != "technology" in this domain in my view. It's the double-great-gp or so that says it, but "tech" in my view leans towards companies with humungous software outreach and data ownership, so clearly FAANG but also Microsoft, Palantir, data warehouses, that's the kind of thing I put in this "tech" bucket. It's a type of company that probably knows more than it should about a lot of things.

And again, this isn't the "Wikipedia" definition (which itself has context-based caveats...), but my opinion and experiences involve this being the sphere of companies one calls a tech company today. I apologize for my inflammatory tone in the other comment and hope I have explained my point, even if you hold a different experience

I probably would call Ericsson a tech company honestly, though that would be a little iffy.

However, I definitely would call a hardware company (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc) a tech company, and their software all sucks.

That being said, you have certainly made your point, and with your definition here I can see why you would think that way, even if I disagree. In addition I agree with the sentiment "It's a type of company that probably knows more than it should about a lot of things." Though I don't necessarily think this defines "tech", or that tech is the correct label, I do think these should get there own label.

As for your other comment, eh no big deal. We all make comments more aggressive then we intend every once in a while.

EDIT: I do think there is a difference between "tech" and "big tech", I think that "tech" would be as I described before, and "big tech"/"big data" is what you were describing.

A very agreeable comment. I think your edit surmises it pretty well actually. Take care!

Same to you. Glad we were able to get to the bottom of this, have a great whatever it is when you read this!

Well, Apple is not "purely software tech", they're primarily hardware, and yet they're very much considered a tech company

If you want to know what it felt like to be tangentially oppressed by IBM's weight, check out the early chapters in this book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Compu...

Also, until 1993 if I recall correctly, Apple was more valuable and had a larger profit than MS.

Apple was well in trouble by 1993. At that point, Microsoft was really starting to take off with popularity of Windows growing quickly.

This really just takes a simple Google search to confirm.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/dazeinfo.com/2019/08/01/apple-r...

In fiscal 1993, the company posted annual revenue of $7,977 million (~ 8 billion), with a year-over-year increase of 12.6%. After two years, in fiscal 1995, the company achieved $10 billion annual revenue milestone for the first time. However, after that, the annual revenue started declining till fiscal 2005 when it again crossed $10 billion mark. Apple generated $13,931 million ($13.9 billion) in fiscal 2005, registering 68% YoY growth.

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