Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen their proposals for things like new product lines and acquisitions. Are you saying those things don’t exist? Did they use to exist and they just stopped that line of business?

View on HN

Those are simply what the clients wanted to do themselves but they needed someone else to be accountable for their stupid ideas, or to resolve an internal conflict. A good consultant company doesn’t actually provide consultancy, but they’re good at figuring out what the client wants and propose the exact same thing as the solution, so the client can take it to their boss and say “look, …”

They definitely exist and I'm actually quite convinced they are valuable... but it's a bit like calling Google a technology company because they sell millions Pixel phones and billions in GCP while >90% of their revenue is still advertisement (please don't quote me on the numbers they are surely incorrect, it's to illustrate the idea).

I'm making a provocative shortcut.

Yes, Google's money comes from advertising. But the company that invented, among many other things, map reduce, bigtable, and spanner, seems pretty much a technology company to me.

Bigtable these days handles seven-billion requests per second over several exabytes of data. All developed in house.

The others are similarly impressive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigtable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)

I'm not questioning what they invented, I'm highlighting their business model, how they actually make money.

Total or Shell use a lot of state of the art technology to mine, they are still oil companies.

Google is an information technology company. They build information technology, and use it to make money. This is in contrast to an ad agency that uses other people's software to sell ads. That company doesn't create technology.

If an oil company creates new technology to extract oil, then they are (obviously) a technology company. If an oil company outsources all technology development, they are not.

Seems like a pointless semantic argument. Is SpaceX a telecom company, since that’s the bulk of their revenue? Does it matter? Do we have to decide every company is in one and only one category?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com