Other industries also exhibit this, like media.
And that is what differs an auto company from a Google. The next car sold still has significant capital investment.
I have never heard that. Car companies are mostly manufacturing, that is the major part of their organizations and what drives their decisions. They have big engineering teams, but they have way bigger teams working at factories. If you had a company just creating car designs and selling those to manufacturing companies it would be a tech company, but the current ones aren't.
When I visited our customer auto assembly plants the only actual manufacturing going on at was the frame and paint. The rest of the parts were shipped in from other manufacturing facilities.
The auto company did design the parts and send them to contract manufacturers, which is what I worked at. Again, I’m sure this depends on the vertical integration and supply chain relationship of each company, but I think there is less manufacturing than assembly going on.
Auto makers could turn into tech companies again but their risk tolerance has to be turned way up.
But we probably should just stick to industry standard jargon. Lockheed and Boeing are definitely technology companies, but not "tech" companies, although that is even further complicated in that they do sell computing hardware and software products, not just airplanes and missiles.
Netflix unambiguously only sells entertainment, though. They use an app and a website as a delivery mechanism, but the app isn't the product.
Also, as much as the emphasis on hacker news is think of employment by Netflix as being an engineer for Netflix, engineers are very far from the highest paid contracts. No engineer is getting the $500 million deals Netflix hands out to Shonda Rhimes and Benioff and Weiss. Netflix itself recognizes content is king here.
Probably because people don't even have a good definition of "tech". Everything we use is tech. Even books. Some of it is old, some of it is new. But people's definition of tech mostly centers around when they were born.
As a software developer, I mostly care if a company considers their software a competitive advantage. Because they're more likely to treat me well. This is also similar to how I tend to define tech companies: companies that view tech as a competitive advantage. So they aren't just buying stuff off the shelf - they're figuring things out in house, regardless of what they sell.