Facebook has grown into a lot of the things. It probably deserves to be grouped with the others. I honestly thing FAANG became the acronym because these companies were making big waves simultaneously at one point, and the acronym is attractive.

There’s never been any good reason not to include Microsoft except that for a long time it was considered old and stodgy.

Netflix doesn’t make sense in terms of market cap, and it also doesn’t make sense in 2021 when it’s more a media company than a technology company. Don’t get me wrong, they totally nailed it on a ton of tech fronts, and deserve their technical accolades…it just looks strange next to the others.

Oh, thinking about Netflix, I just figured it out. It’s about SWE salaries, and not really related to much else.

…although if that’s it, then Amazon doesn’t really deserve it’s spot any more than Microsoft.