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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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My contention is that the use of technology is so universal that it's not meaningful to call a company a technology company just because they use a lot of technology, even if they have to create a lot of it themselves. Pretty much every big company has on-staff software engineers making and implementing custom technology. It takes a lot of technology to make a law firm work but that doesn't make a law firm a technology company. If we use too-expansive of a definition for what's a technology company, then it applies to almost every company, making it a useless term.
I do not think social media companies are technology focused. They just use technology to achieve their social media (/advertising) business goals, the same as every bank, every hospital, every trucking company, etc.
Absolutely 💯
Then you don't think Google is a Tech company?
If you took technology away from banking, hospitals or a law firm, you might still have a business. If you took technology away from social media, you don't have anything left. It is the focus and the medium.
Technologies also do not exist in a vacuum either, they exist for a purpose. The purpose of social media is socialization, as well as advertising and information dissemination.
Sure, today anyone can host a Mastodon, but I wouldn't call that any less technologically-focused.
Not particularly, no.
I don’t think the mere fact that you access something solely on a website or app makes it a tech company. That’s merely a means to an end. But there’s no more technology involved in running a social media company than there is a modern bank. The technology is actually a lot simpler.
I’d say that Mastodon as a software project is technology; the various instances, however, are not.
And all of these social media companies really are providing a means for the communication of information within societies. You can do this without "modern day" technology, such as through TV, radio, newspapers, or even word of mouth. Technology in the form of smartphones, the internet, and programs/platforms like Twitter and Mastodon allow us to communicate in ways previously not known to humanity.
So yeah, I agree with you.
Banking has some tech that is more advanced than many consumer electronics so I don't think that's a fair measure, not to mention that the tech behind large scale social media is still pretty advanced.
This definition would make it so basically only hardware, OS and some cloud infrastructure service companies could count as tech companies because technology is generally not made for its own sake. It seems needlessly restrictive. Like, is Nintendo not a tech company? It makes entertainment products sure, but it designs and produces its own devices and systems for that. I don't believe having an end purpose or being also a part of another market disqualifies it from that. You'd have an easier time convincing me there are way more tech companies.
I think at this point we just fundamentally disagree over what a tech company must be. Even if we took search in isolation I'd still count Google as one, as well as advertising, not exclusively. It also tends to be covered as such too.
Yes, that's pretty much my point (but you also need to add companies selling software itself). The alternative is that every company is a technology company, making the term completely meaningless.
Google is a big company and some of what it does is tech company stuff: Gmail, Chrome, Google Cloud, Pixel. But all of that is tangential their main business, which is just selling ads. I don't object to the tech parts being covered by tech news. I just don't think a company's tech-focused side projects (as a percentage of its business) make it a tech company.
I don't think search engine or social media tech are side projects for Google and Twitter respectively. As much as Google may offer ads separately, Google wouldn't be what it is without their search engine, and without their social media, Twitter or Facebook would have nothing to deliver ads with.
If you are counting software, that's all the more reason to consider social media as tech. By your reasoning, Microsoft Office is not tech, it just uses tech for, well, office tools, Adobe Suite uses tech for art tools. But if software companies are tech, which I also believe, then companies whose core business is developing and maintaining an online platform are tech too.
Ultimately I see that there is a lot of grey area, but if we cut it solely to companies who make and sell tech for it alone, which is itself a very debatable rule, then we'd cut off a lot of companies which I believe to be tech.