I would suggest the following:

* a car company makes cars that it sells to consumers or other businesses

* a tortilla company makes tortillas that it sells to consumers or other businesses

* a chip fabrication company makes chips that it ...

... you see where I'm going with this?

* a tech company is a company that makes technology that it sells to consumers and other businesses.

Amazon is a tech company, but only because of AWS, not the marketplace or its own retail operations.

AirBnB is not a tech company. Neither is Ebay.

Maybe we need a new term like "tech-dependent company" to describe most of what are currently termed "tech companies".

All companies are "tech-dependent companies." This is an intellectual dead end.

Traditionally, the business world has qualified tech companies as those which primarily function via zero marginal cost distribution provided by software and the internet.

If Airbnb and Ebay aren't tech companies, then neither are Google and Facebook. All four are marketplaces (Google and Facebook are advertising marketplaces at their core).

Saas and marketplaces are the most solidly "tech" businesses that exist by the textbook definition. They fully take advantage of zero marginal cost distribution.

I don’t think that definition is right. Nobody will argue that Apple isn’t a tech company, and the iPhone isn’t zero-marginal-cost.

This isn't a black or white thing. It's a spectrum. On one end you have pure play tech like Stripe or Facebook (100% zero marginal cost). On the other end you have industrial firms who produce mostly undifferentiated commodities with thin margins like tires (super high marginal cost).

Apple is clearly a tech company since they conduct tons of activities that are zero marginal cost (iOS, MacOS, App Stores, AppleTV, Apple Music, Apple News, Logic Pro, iCloud storage, etc. etc.)

However if you remove the software part of their business, then they'd be a commodity phone company, and valued by Wall Street in the same way TV manufacturers are (ie. like Samsung, with a PE ratio roughly half that of Apple).

The higher value and differentiation is mostly derived from the software (an OLED screen with a processor attached isn't high margin otherwise--see Samsung's margins). Hence why "software is eating the world."

Would you call Tesla a tech company?

Yes. They make and sell technology to customers.

Tesla is a tech company, and Facebook/Amazon/Google are not? Maybe your definition is “right” in some sense, but is also useless, given that it’s not the definition anyone else is using.

Then under your definition, Otis elevators and GE and Boeing and are also tech companies.

boeing has lots and lots and lots of software. they aren't a consumer electronics company or engagement optimization company, but they sure are tech.

Yes, they are.

Amazon doesn't make anything. Increasingly it doesn't even own what it's selling. Same with AirBNB. They're selling a marketing platform to businesses.

AWS isn't a "marketing platform", and it's where most of their profit comes from. It's a bundle of many different and related technologies, most of which have only a few competitors and would be tricky to implement locally.

And then there's that "Amazon doesn't make anything" claim so neatly demolished by jodrellbank.

> Amazon doesn't make anything.

Kindle. Firestick. Echo / Echo glasses/earbuds/wearables. Delivery drone (prototypes). Luna controller. The new AZ1 chip inside Echos. They own Ring (doorbells) and Eero Wi-Fi routers.

They custom design[1] their own internal routers, chips, storage and compute servers and network cards, they own Annapurna.

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-secret-wea...

Sure. Their biggest production line is probably the robots that are at work in their warehouses. But it's all still a rounding error for the core Ecommerce & data center businesses.

> biggest production line is probably the robots that are at work in their warehouses

pffft. Robot roles for their warehouses is a distinctly bounded and rather small "marketplace". Kindle sales likely outnumber this by at least 3 orders of magnitude. Not to mention Alexa technologies.

An Amazon employee once told me that Jeff Bezos would agree that Amazon is _not_ a tech company

> Airbnb's main offering is its software and its ability to create a market between consumers and producers through that application.

Is Expedia a tech company?

Yeah, they were definitely part of the first wave of bing name internet tech companies. I expect that in 10 years AriBnB will be similarly boring.

Expedia is literally a dotcom that was spun off from Microsoft.