You had me until your fourth paragraph. If your argument is that Uber, Netflix are not tech vendors because they sell a service; they do not sell/license software, then you are correct.
Oftentimes the label tech company is used as shorthand for Internet company — a company that leverages the near-zero distribution cost of the Internet to deliver a product (e.g. Google Search, Facebook) or a service (e.g urban mobility via Uber, home delivery via Amazon).
In this sense, it would not be correct to say Uber or Netflix are not tech companies.
My argument is that if we use tech to mean what it means (the application of knowledge) that MANY MANY MANY different types of companies fall under one useless blanket. Dow, Dupont, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Chase etc. Instead we should call them what they are, chemical companies and banks. Every bank is now an "internet company."
Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon build databases, programming frameworks, hardware, operating systems. "Tech platform vendor?"
The label can be useless, I agree, which is why I try to limit my use to certain contexts where its use makes sense or can be inferred correctly.
I do think we should limit its use to something of a legal term, as I tried to explain elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20879152
Re:What Is a Tech Company?
by erikpukinskis on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @01:57PM
(#20879730)
Tech just means computing.
Technology is "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry."
People tend to confuse tech and tools. The lever is a tool. Using a lever to create leverage, is technology. (You can argue that the lever is technology too, in that its applied knowledge of smelting, but that misses the point.)
Uber is the application of engineering talent to automate taxi dispatch. Netflix is the application of engineering talent to distribute video. But that doesnt make them tech companies, because they dont SELL or LICENSE that tech to others. Their product itself isnt tech for others to use. They have in housed software, and they use their software development prowess as a competitive advantage. "Tech companies" should be reserved for the Microsoft, Google, Apple, Salesforce, SAPs of the world that SELL/LICENSE software that acts as a Business Middleware and Development Platforms. But more importantly, they need to be MORE than just a company that takes business requirements and digitizes them (UltiPro for example, who applies existing Microsoft/Google tech/tools, but isnt creating their own database tech or frameworks. You can be a software assembly company, that solves business problems, without being a tech company,) they need to be inventive, creating new applied knowledge. (In that case, Uber actually does tangentially count, because they are a software middleware to connect drivers and riders, and they are engineering new tech not just reassembling off the shelf components.)
For nearly everything else, we can just call a spade a spade and call a company what it actually is. A bank. A car company. Taxi dispatch. Video hosting and production. Semiconductors. Fabrication. Manufacturing.
Lumping every company that has good engineering talent into a pile may be good for investors to help categorize investments, but for everyone else it just turns conversation into nonsense.