When I said source doesn't matter, I meant whether your customers are public or private sector. The salient aspect of a technology company, for me, is that it

When I said source doesn't matter, I meant whether your customers are public or private sector. The salient aspect of a technology company, for me, is that it develops and sells new technological artifacts and derives most of its revenue from that activity. Google would be a technology company if it developed a search engine and then sold it to others, which for a brief and economically irrelevant time, it did. That's not its business model. What's objectionable about today's Silicon Valley isn't that it's not about silicon (or even software or any kind of new technology at all) but that it continues, collectively and individually, to market itself as though it were. There's nothing wrong with making phone books. Phone books are useful. Google makes a pretty nice one, and sometimes the Yellow Pages (the ads) are exactly what you want anyway. But you're not selling technology, you're selling ads in phone books that you then give away. Just say so. While we're here, don't deceive yourself into thinking that assembling the contents of the phone book in a complete, concise, useful way (what "users" want) isn't revenue-generating. The more useful the phone book is, the more advertisers will pay to appear in it. If you end up creating some whiz-bang technology for internal use that makes that easier/better/whatever, that's great. But if you're not bringing that to market for others to use, you shouldn't be calling yourself a technology company.