It's now been taken over by the tech industry to be shorthand for places that are highly selective in their hiring and tend to work on cutting edge tech at scale.
That being said, the impact of Netflix on tech is pretty big. They pioneered using the cloud to run at massive scale.
Which is to say they were AWS's biggest early customer? Doesn't really seem like Netflix should get the credit for that one.
Netflix tech even spawned a company to sell their open source tools:
And they codified the entire practice of Chaos Engineering:
That, and FAAG had less of a ring to it.
Edit: Dammit, the GP made the same observation. Oh well, I'm keeping it.
Eh, the new parent company names aren't really what people know them as still. I don't think most people are even aware that Google has a parent company.
I have a friend that works at Google, and that's what we say. I don't think him or anyone would ever say he works at Alphabet.
But Google is still Google, and probably always will be. Just like Youtube is still Google, and Waymo is still Google.
In Europe you nearly always see "GNAFAM", which includes Microsoft too. It's certainly weird to exclude MSFT, worth at times more than Amazon+Meta+Netflix combined.
But for every other one of the FAA(N)G companies, I can barely work a day as a developer without touching every one of their technologies. Yeah, Netflix got into ML years before most, but the netflix prize exists as a distant cautionary memory, and as an ML professional, I'd literally never heard of metaflow before. Just sayin'.
Nowhere was the argument made that somehow Netflix was more influential than Twitter/Uber/AirBnB, but your counter-argument that somehow it's less influential because you haven't heard of/used some projects directly holds no ground.
Oh come on, they are indisputably right that Microsoft, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, hell, even Cloudflare are more technically influential than Netflix is.
Apple and Google would make anyone's top 5, that's his point. No argument about it. Their products collectively dominate anyone's life, along with MSFT. Netflix is maybe in your top 10, top 20 for sure, but it's not up there as one of the few 'platform that everyone's lives are built on' techcos.
(Like, Netflix vs Microsoft? Seriously? For that matter, Amazon probably wouldn't be in my top 5 either, and not only because it's not mainly a tech company. I s'pose it depends how you define 'Amazon', and if you include AWS. But for Netflix there's just no argument that they win a spot there.)