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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

That ship has sailed. “Tech” is simply a positioning or branding term.

Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm.

The term has become so denatured that a new term, “deep tech” has been coined to mean what “technology company” used to mean.

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My personal test for this is: what percentage of the company's total value is comprised of the intellectual property their software source code holds.

The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are.

No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of value tied up in their brand or their sales book of business.

Isn't that a test for a software company?

Texas Instruments' value is mostly in their integrated circuits IP (as well as manufacturing prowess, process knowledge, and a little bit of software). They're still solidly a "tech" company in my books.

Yeah, and what about the value of production hardware and infrastructure? (Stuff not being sold/transferred to customers.)

For example, imagine a company with very little proprietary code because they focus entirely on renting out their CPU/GPU/disk capacity, for supercomputing, databases, render-farms, cloud backup, etc. I'd still call that a "tech company."

It's also not clear how this "intellectual property of the source code" angle would accommodate the network-effects or value of a subscriber-base... Well, I suppose you could argue that such an asset doesn't require high-tech means, it could all be snail-mail.

You may find that Amazon would fall into the "traditional" on this scale.

It's a bit of both. "Tech" is any company that can rely on technology rather than manpower and raw materials to scale up. Everyone wants to position themselves as such, but the truth always shows up on the balance sheet.

Merely using technology is what all businesses do, from the inclined plane to the microprocessor these days.

An X business is one that differentiates itself on factor X. If they use it in a truly innovative way (which changes — what was innovative in the 90s is commodity today) or develop new technologies in house than you’re a tech business.

WeWork tried to brand itself as a “tech” company. I agree it’s possible to sus out what companies are actually in the technology space but the label is thrown around far too much.

I don't think it's sailed. I think the classes of people that feel like they're falling behind resent success. It doesn't matter where that success comes from. The solution isn't to try to disarm the agitated language. The solution is to help the losers succeed, too.

Yeah the non specificity irks me as a lifelong builder and engineer. I mean, welding and the cotton gin are tech if you want to frame it that way.

So is using acrylics or oils for painters. It may have been around for a while but it’s still technology.

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