> Microsoft is just selling unopinionated software to all businesses in the world

You have to be satirical right? Microsoft is notorious for lobbying everything to this day. Browser monopolies, OS monopolies, they pretty much invented EEE, made whole cities switch to their OS and the whole xbox platform is very political regarding software, gambling and IP politics.

He asked about how the average American views Bill Gates, not how the average person who read /. in the 90s views Bill Gates.

Hell, they're so not FAANG, they're not even in the acronym.

But I get it. If I were slotting tech companies into eras, they'd be before Facebook/Google, but after the real old school guys like IBM, AT&T, and Xerox.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and if FAANG means “big tech companies with continued big growth”, M is more deserving of the title than, for instance, G. FAAN all have over 300% return over past 5 years, as does M. G however is at like 130%, roughly the same as the Nasdaq. Which to me roughly means they aren’t growing faster than the average tech company (NASDAQ being roughly an index of tech)

(Work at M, may be biased :) )

I also felt that the N was out of place as its market cap is about 1/3 the next smallest (FB at $0.77B vs. $0.22B). The rest (and MSFT) are all > $1B. NFLX has a lower cap than NVDA, ADBE, and PYPL (and TSLA and BABA).