What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#2I'm surprised that the OP doesn't consider Simple a technology company. Isn't it solely selling an experience via software?
If so, making good software must be its top priority.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#3I'm surprised that the OP doesn't consider Simple a technology company. Isn't it solely selling an experience via software? If so, making good software must be its top priority.
You could say the same about the UX for any company that sells primarily online. I think the author's point is that just depending on a website as a critical part of your business doesn't make your business a technology business, anymore than having a fleet of delivery trucks makes a furniture store a transportation company.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#4Most companies are "Technology Companies" because they would fail to function in a meaningful way if their technology no longer functioned correctly. To divide companies in the way the author has is perfectly reasonable, as are many other arbitrary lines in the sand.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#5The part of this article I really associated with is the focus on "startup drama". The startup drama has its place -- stories of founders fighting through the hard time or working out when to throw in the towel are wonderfully didactic in nature whilst getting across the human story. It's why Founders at Work is one of my favourite books.
Most tech blogs however have distorted these startup dramas to the point they look like poorly scripted television shows. They've discovered, just as gossip magazines did, that more drama => more eyeballs => more revenue. Very few sources I have come across prioritize information over hype and it feels like the tech community is paying for it.
What I disagree with in the article though is the focus only on wanting to hear of tech startups. I asked an entrepreneur on advice about Natural Language Processing startups (of which he'd founded a few). He said "To bake banana bread you need to be able to bake bread". Tech startups, as different as they are to normal businesses and startups in other fields, share a great deal as well. We'd do well learning from their trials and follies too and hence why HN is so open to articles from all over the map.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#6The "software is eating the world" meme when put into perspective is like saying "accounting practices are eating the world" or "sales strategies are eating the world" in 99% of real world cases. In most businesses, software has become another staple support of a competitive business but it is not an end in itself. In other words, software is a means of trying to achieve maximum efficiency of existing processes and this has been the case for a long time.
We probably don't like to acknowledge it but software is predominantly a support role in most of the companies it is so called "eating." It is utilized to streamline the business process once it has been defined and proven to have an impact on the bottom line.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#7If you come up with a new definition of "tech company" and it doesn't include Google you're probably not on to something. Google lives and dies by their technology. They are the technology company.
Reductio ad absurdum and all that.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#8I'm surprised that the OP doesn't consider Simple a technology company. Isn't it solely selling an experience via software? If so, making good software must be its top priority.
You could say the same about the UX for any company that sells primarily online. I think the author's point is that just depending on a website as a critical part of your business doesn't make your business a technology business, anymore than having a fleet of delivery trucks makes a furniture store a transportation company.
Couple of things:
If a furniture company is unable to function without having an in-house fleet of trucks (as opposed to outsourcing it to a transportation company and/or contracted drivers), then they are really a logistics and transportation company (which could readily start selling or transporting other goods, if they so wished).
If whether or not they did this in house didn't make a visible impact on their growth rate, they would still be a purely furniture company.
Pre-AWS Amazon.com, on the other hand, was an entirely different beast: they built a highly scalable, relevant (they built out a whole division in Palo Alto devoted to machine learning and search relevance), web application. This would be akin to a furniture company building their own trucks (even if on somebody else's chassis).
Likewise, Google doesn't just display advertising they build their own advertising technology. If they merely used banner advertising, they would be (at _most_ a) $100 million company, and not a $200 billion one.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#9Kinda, you can tell what kind of a company is by where it makes it's profit.
IBM is a services company that develops technology so it can service that technology.
Microsoft is a desktop operating system and office suite company that develops software to sell desktop operating system and office suites.
Apple is a consumer electronics company that develops technology to sell gizmos.
Facebook is an ad platform company that develops software to sell ads.
ARM is a licensing company that develops technology so it can sell licenses.
Wal-Mart is a retail company that develops technology to deliver lower prices.
Technology means far more than just ICs and software.
Re: What Is And Is Not A Technology Company
#10Most companies are "Technology Companies" because they would fail to function in a meaningful way if their technology no longer functioned correctly. To divide companies in the way the author has is perfectly reasonable, as are many other arbitrary lines in the sand.
When asking what type of company is company X the answer should be the same as "In 1 or 2 words, what do they produce and sell"?
The problem is that "tech company" has become a complement and inversely not being able to call yourself one implies you are behind the times. But in reality, just about every company would fail in a meaningful way if their technology no longer functioned. Its difficult for me to think of a business that wouldn't falter without their technology functioning.