A fundamentally semantic argument like this seems mostly irrelevant to me. It's like calling Google or Facebook advertising services, which might technically be

A fundamentally semantic argument like this seems mostly irrelevant to me. It's like calling Google or Facebook advertising services, which might technically be true but isn't usefully descriptive. Using the author's logic you could call high frequency trading firms tech companies instead of financial services. If his semantics here were correct one might wonder why nobody calls HFTs tech companies. The author ignores the more complicated side of the questions about what makes a company a "tech company" — mushy concepts like internal corporate culture, sources of talent, and participation in the broader tech "ecosystem". Also the idea that Netflix's content strategy is cleanly separable from its tech is totally bogus. Netflix uses some sophisticated tech to decide what content to produce and also has a huge amount of in-house technology involved in the actual production of content.