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Re:Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco by CSMastermind on Friday July 21, 2023 @06:17PM (#36820692)
My personal test for this is: what percentage of the company's total value is comprised of the intellectual property their software source code holds.

The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are.

No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of value tied up in their brand or their sales book of business.

Re:Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco by mitthrowaway2 on Friday July 21, 2023 @07:12PM (#36821265)
Isn't that a test for a software company?

Texas Instruments' value is mostly in their integrated circuits IP (as well as manufacturing prowess, process knowledge, and a little bit of software). They're still solidly a "tech" company in my books.

Re:Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco by Terr_ on Friday July 21, 2023 @08:09PM (#36821757)
Yeah, and what about the value of production hardware and infrastructure? (Stuff not being sold/transferred to customers.)

For example, imagine a company with very little proprietary code because they focus entirely on renting out their CPU/GPU/disk capacity, for supercomputing, databases, render-farms, cloud backup, etc. I'd still call that a "tech company."

It's also not clear how this "intellectual property of the source code" angle would accommodate the network-effects or value of a subscriber-base... Well, I suppose you could argue that such an asset doesn't require high-tech means, it could all be snail-mail.

Re:Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco by cratermoon on Friday July 21, 2023 @08:47PM (#36822019)
You may find that Amazon would fall into the "traditional" on this scale.