So what's the point in the term at all? What are you using it to do if you know the person you're speaking to cannot infer anything at all from the word?

My claim is that the overwhelming majority of people have no problem understanding the label. The term is not precisely defined, and can be debated in slim gray areas, but the term does not in practice cause miscommunication in the vast majority of cases.

It makes a big difference in the aggregated analysis of the IPO market. Tech is one of the few IPO areas that actually come close to matching the S&P500 returns (tech did better than any other IPO category). So, most companies going public want to be considered and valued as "tech".

For them wouldn't a tech company and a software company be synonymous? It seems like software is by far the easiest way to create the growth they're after.

Cool, so it doesn't really matter.

Because tech makes VC and big money investors salivate and throw cash down, whereas real estate is ho-hum, risky, boring, etc. WeWork desperately wants that tech label to justify their terrible balance sheet.

Not only is the term loosely defined, but it is not clear why it needs to be mutually exclusive with some other category. You can't be a tech company and some other thing at the same time, apparently.

Who uses the terms this way? I’ve never heard anyone imply that, for example, Apple is a tech company but not a smartphone company. Edit: see also "biotech," "fintech," "edtech," etc.