The SV definition of tech leans towards "a user-centric service delivered over the web, with some clever software solutions behind it to handle a lot of data and users".

I thought the definition was more about scaling because of the near zero incremental cost of servicing another customer. But using some sort of tech as the product.

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.

> Everybody I know considers a car company a tech company

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.

I suppose it depends on the car company, but a lot of them are logistics companies coupled with assembly plants.

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.

Audi. Vorsprung durch Technik.

I don't doubt they were tech companies 80 years ago when things were new and creating new tech was more important. However I don't think that Google or Facebook or Microsoft will be tech companies in 50 years either, its just the nature of having a field being mostly explored and companies being in maintenance mode since there isn't much else they can do.

For some weird reason, "tech" means "consumer software /SaaS". So, Trello or Yelp is tech, while lasers in space are not tech.