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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of this poll eludes me due to including Netflix and excluding Microsoft.

FAANG was originally about hot stocks. Jim Cramer coined it. And then, in tech circles, it became mostly about compensation--which had some correlation but imperfectly.

Today, especially with Netflix being less unique technically (they did a lot of early out-of-the-box stuff like going all in on AWS and microservices), they're pretty much an outlier from the other companies although as far as I know they still pay very well. As they become more of a studio they'll become even more of an outlier.

Microsoft certainly has more in common with the others, but their stock (as well as the company generally) was out of favor when Cramer coined the term.

Yes, I am aware of the history, which is why I specified the "purpose" of the poll.

A poll about FAANG with netflix and excluding microsoft seems simply like a poll about a group of companies that a tv show host made a catchy acronym about, rather than a poll about which of the big tech companies today is likely to decline or not.

> in October 2021, Cramer suggested replacing FAANG with MAMAA; this included replacing Netflix with Microsoft among the five companies represented as Netflix's valuation had not kept up with the other companies included in his acronym; with Microsoft, these new five companies had market caps of at least $900 billion compared to Netflix's $310 billion at the time of Meta's rebranding.

They also seem much smaller than the other companies, smaller than Microsoft certainly.

They're (relatively speaking) tiny. About 12,000 employees. That's in the ballpark of 10% the size of Microsoft and Alphabet, 20% the size of Facebook. That's about the same number of employees as you'll find at a lot of tech companies you'd consider medium-sized at most.

> As they become more of a studio they'll become even more of an outlier

also, as they invest in developing proprietary production software they could get an advantage over other studios.

There has actually been increasing collaboration among studios on software. See the Academy Software Foundation for example. https://www.aswf.io/

And Netflix themselves has released a fair bit of code as open source.

An observation that I've made is that people disregard Microsoft as if they've crossed over from some alternate universe where Windows isn't the predominant operating system on both desktops and servers, and Azure isn't the second biggest public cloud platform.

I regularly see comments like: "The public clouds providers like Amazon, Google, and I suppose even Oracle".

It's kind of hilarious to see people just skip over the second biggest company in the world like it doesn't even exist in their minds.

tester756[0] Proposed MAGMA as the successor for FAANG. I'm still waiting for it to happen.

MAGMA: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon.

[0]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29278804

Google is Alphabet. It's MAAAM, and sounds like Cartman.

For most intents and purposes, it's also true that Alphabet is Google. (Youtube is also part of Google.)

Why do people insist on reinventing it when FAAMG works just fine? Also makes no sense to keep Google (Alphabet) but swap out Facebook (Meta).

Exactly, FAANG is a thing of the past, now the MAMAA is the Big Five

(And TBH, it had been a surprise to be FANG, not FAMG to begin with)

The Muppet in me is still holding out for MANAMA.

Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon

Works for me.

We need two more, NVIDIA and AMD? Then it's MANAMANA (do do do do do).

Dell and Oracle, etc

There are a ton of large tech companies once you get beyond the obvious "hot" ones.

Microsoft should have always been part of the Big Five. FAANG never made much sense.

Exactly!

Although back in 2013 the criteria was: "totally dominant in their markets". AFAIK, Microsoft dominates only two markets (OS and office suites) and it's only if we limit ourselves to desktop; even then, it's not a total domination.

But which market has Apple ever been dominating?

That was criteria for FANG. Via Wikipedia:

> Cramer expanded FANG to FAANG in 2017, adding Apple to the other four companies due to its revenues placing it as a potential Fortune 50 company.

Not a FAANG

FAANG == Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google.

It's an acronym specifically for those companies, which is why Microsoft was excluded.

Yes. But the point is that a term coined by a TV stock personality years ago has pretty much zero relevance for looking at what the arc is going to be for what are seen as leading tech companies (through a Silicon Valley lens).

If you think that's outdated, wait til you hear there are still people investing in "Dow Jones" index funds or aiming for "Ivy League" schools!

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