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Comment by bfuclusion | Hacker News Reader

From it's own definitions this article is patently false. Quote: "applying scientific knowledge for practical purposes" You're doing that when you try to reduce time to display from 1 second to 1000ms, when trying to chose algorithms that better match your users real usage of the site, to just plain moving a button a few pixels so people see it better. It doesn't have to be the new shiny to make an actual impact.

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I 100% agree with you, and to dismiss web apps in this way is to devalue making thinking easier for people. However, I'm also amused by the Freudian slip of 1 second to 1000 ms, which would of course be "tech" instead of tech.

Yeah, that one would indeed be "tech":). I meant 100ms of course.

WeWork is a "tech" company in the sense that the actual business is a thin tech veneer around an established business model (like Regus Group). A huge number of SaaS services are effectively a thin design layer around a database, a technology that has been established decades ago. I think that's the real thrust of the post.

I tried writing this three times, and I'm probably going to screw it up anyways but here's my take on business models and "tech": If the entirety of your approach is an existing model but "on the internet" and you don't spend any effort on what "on the internet" really means, then you might be in "tech". However if you take the time to carefully apply yourself to how the new environment changes your business model and your relationship with customers, and exercise sound technical and product focused expertise in so doing, then you're in tech. Efficiency, expanded markets, better experience, ease of use, etc are real tangible benefits, even if the whole product is just a shell around a 1970s COBOL database.

The article explicitly gives that definition to show that everything is tech by the dictionary - from fire and pottery to vertical-landing rockets and quantum computers. It then points out that the common-use definition of tech has more to do with the (fuzzy) novelty of the scientific discovery than with the existence of it.

Is this very different from people who tune the design of springs in car door handles so they have a nice click when you open them? That's good engineering, but is it what you'd call tech? Or does it need to be done on a web app to be tech?

Absolutely that's tech. Metallurgy, force maps, 3d models, computer controlled machining, etc is in fact HIGH technology. To previous generations that's just plain magic, even if the user doesn't spend more than 1/10th of second thinking about it.

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