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Comment by propter_hoc | Hacker News Reader

Netflix's inclusion in this list instead of Microsoft may have been the best investor-relations coup in history.

+1, it's ridiculous and misleading that Netflix is still being included in this list after all this time.

Netflix is a TV company. Their tech is a commodity. An important commodity, for sure, but it's not what makes them valuable. Their critical offering is their reach and programming.

FAAMG (or MAAAM now, I guess?) is a sane grouping of giant companies because their critical offerings and expertise areas are their software and their platforms. I think Google would be totally capable of reimplementing Netflix's streaming services if they needed to, but after years of trying they still haven't been able to fully match Amazon Web Services. That's the difference between Big Company and Big Tech Company. Similarly, it's why Tesla isn't on this list: they're huge and growing and they write software, but their software is just a means to an end, not a valuable platform in itself.

Google already has a streaming service but they do it on hard mode by allowing anyone to upload content to it.

Is their tech a commodity? I knew one of the principals (who was hired away by Uber for an ungodly sum of money) who had spent years writing a lot of proprietary networking code. I don't think that IP is a commodity, is it?

It’s definitely not a commodity in the usual sense that anyone can just buy it. It requires a lot of custom software, and importantly it also requires a lot of negotiations with CDNs and a lot of datacenter buildout to get the requisite amount of points of presence to serve content economically.

But it is a “commodity” in the sense that it’s just a thing that needs to be built to support their product offering, and which other similar companies with similar product offerings have built. Disney+ exists, Hulu exists, Amazon built Prime Video, Google has been operating YouTube for years. If you need to serve streaming video, it’s no longer a groundbreaking feat to be able to do it.

+2, FAANG was coined by Jim Cramer to be a grouping of fast growing tech stocks almost 10 years ago, not a grouping of the largest and most important tech companies. Apple and Microsoft are both about 10x the market cap of Netflix.

And around that time the Microsoft stock had beeen fairly flat for the previous decade. But the Microsoft of the 2010s isn’t the Microsoft of the 2000s stock wise. The stock has grown quite a lot as well since FAANG was coined.

Have we all really been parroting Jim Cramer all these years? That's really quite sad.

The word fang is pretty catchy.

Why sad? He’s a smart guy and his show is great for lots of retail investors.

I think you meant he's a TV personality and his show is great for entertainment.

I second MAAAM - Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft

Throw netflix back and make it MAMANA :D

MAGMA is my favourite string currently.

If you're changing a letter in the acronym from F (Facebook) to M (Meta), it is inconsistent to not change G (Google) to A (Alphabet).

Not if you are using exchange tickers

Isn't Meta still trading under FB, leaving you with FAANG?

"Google would be totally capable of reimplementing Netflix's streaming services"

Perhaps some sort of "Tube" that "You" could use to watch content, maybe with a subscription option?

Hah, exactly.

Netflix will be fine; they sell a reasonable, understandable product at a reasonable, understandable price, which makes me most confident in them by far.

The product is getting worse over time due to content providers cutting them off in favor of their own services.

It's a lot easier for Disney and their ilk to build streaming services than it is for Netflix to build Disney's content catalog. Props to Netflix though, they've been punching above their weight in that area.

It's also a lot easier to pirate than it is to sign up for a billion different services. I'd put my money on "Netflix making this work somewhow" over "Cable all over again."

The list is based on salaries. Microsoft does not reportedly pays as much as FAANGs.

Microsoft comp is bimodal. They will compete with the best in some cases.

this is simply not true

Well, when I left in 2010 it was extremely true. Not even remotely in the ballpark. According to Levels.fyi they pay about 50% more now, but still less than any FAANG.

My impression when I was at MS was that they hire you at a competitive market salary, and their HR claims to do surveys and keep your yearly increases in line with market rates, however it seemed pretty easy for increases to not keep pace with market rate increases, in part because the market rate has increased pretty steadily lately.

I don't think they're the only ones with this issue. Job hoppers can get bigger raises than people staying and climbing the ladder "the old fashioned way".

Competitive with somebody. Just not with FAANG.

I'm not sure I agree with you, but it can vary with the time period being considered and for me it's been a long time.

Also worth noting that while many in Seattle complain about housing costs, cost of living is much lower than in the bay area. That was definitely part of my calculus for accepting an MS offer years ago.

The important metric is what percentile of the market band each company targets. The word on the street (blind) is that MS pays median to 60th, while G/FB pay at 90th percentile. Granted with how MS stock has performed from 2016 and onward, actual compensation has been pretty good, depending on when someone joins.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...

They will gladly match FAANG comp for senior hires, L63+. The low salaries on levels.fyi is skewed by junior positions.

> this is simply not true

No. I work for a FAANG company at the moment and Microsoft was my previous employer and i can confirm that Microsoft significantly underpays when compared with FAANG.

Definitely. A huge boon for Netflix to have been included in this group because of the first letter of its name.

Reminds me of the Dow Jones, which is just 30 somewhat-arbitrary companies, and is basically the sum of the stock prices of those companies (yes, that means a $800/share company matters 20X more than a $20/share company).

Nah its just easier to say fang than famg

> Nah its just easier to say fang than famg

Interestingly, from a physical perspective there's not much difference between saying "fagm" and saying "fact". But one of those is easy for English speakers and one is impossible.

Coarticulated velar/labial consonants exist in other languages, though.

Yeah but you get cancelled if you say "fagm" these days.