Twitter veteran, former API director Alex Payne

Alex Payne, the Twitter veteran and former API director Alex Payne, said that since technology is now a prerequisite for success, it has been confusing the meaning of "startups" and "technology companies", and only those companies that really sell technology are "technology companies", The industry also needs a new terminology to differentiate.

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When I was a child, my family and I had daily habits in the morning. After breakfast, read the newspaper, I often go straight to the commercial version, and then from here to the back of the news to see yesterday's stock prices. By reading the small lines of text, I looked at the stock prices of sun, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, and silicon, and then went back to the business page to see if I could get useful information from the chip giants. Finally, looking at the interesting version, I was really an eccentric child.

But now, like everyone else, I don't read newspapers. Most mornings, I sit around with my ipad, then log in to the American tech News and blog aggregation website Techmeme, which often leads me to several different "tech blogs" that provide a series of rumors, opinions, gossip, polished press releases and, in rare cases, real news.

According to my experience over the years, there is a huge difference between science and technology news. My recent experience is that most of what is known as technology news is essentially irrelevant to technology.

Chaotic tech start-ups

American tech blog TechCrunch Some of the news is always bothering me, and over the years it has made me more irritable. The blog rose to become a force that simply links it to the tsunami-like traffic that destroys a Web site. As a publication with the word "technology" in its name, technology is just a mix of TechCrunch reports, software and hardware are just background music, and the real interest of the site is: Money, authority, success and failure, rising and fading. I read the TechCrunch news as if I were a child when I read the newspaper business section that I wanted to skip. The word "merger", "acquisition" in the title, and the picture of two executives in a suit-shaking handshake are annoying.

The popularity of TechCrunch has spawned a series of imitators, and most of the "science journalism", including blogs, uses the same operating model, even newspapers have adopted the overall format of TechCrunch and the publishing speed of technology news. This has not only changed the tone and depth of technology news reports, but also altered the subject. Newspapers tend to focus on established businesses, while TechCrunch focus on start-ups. Although each enterprise has its own mode of development, but the company has become the science and technology news industry issues of common concern.

Startups get so much attention for their own reasons: startups are exciting. Startups are often led by interesting people who want to do something big. Startups look rebellious and non-mainstream, but it's a good place to read the news at the breakfast table. Startups are full of drama, will they survive? Will it be bought by 1 billion dollars? And the startups like to talk about themselves, which is convenient for journalists.

Start-up companies are essentially non-tech companies

Some clichés have now been accepted, saying that "software will swallow the world", but the assumption is that every company has a hint of technology companies and that they will grow fast. Many new companies start with glasses, baby food and other industry areas, do everything possible to use technology: Supply chain management, marketing, recruitment, internal communications, product development. If you don't look closely, these businesses make them look like a technology company, but they are not, they are glasses and baby food companies.

Sometimes, we mistakenly think of "start-up companies" as "technology start-ups" and "enterprises" mistakenly think of "technology enterprises". The definition of a technology company is indistinguishable, as every fast-growing enterprise needs huge technical capacity to sustain success. is a company with a "programmer" or "engineer" called a technology company? If a company was invested by venture capitalists who had previously invested in technology companies, would we consider the company a technology company? If a company's founders are using notebooks when they think of good business ideas, So will the company be considered a technology company?

Definition of a technology company

In fact, these problems can be easily solved, if your business is selling technology, you are a technology company. In other words, if the product you use to make money contains the application of scientific knowledge that can solve specific problems and make people work, you are a technology company.

By this definition, most companies with "tech blogs" are not technology companies, they are just companies. These companies may use technology, develop technology, and their technology is even used by technology companies to work, but they are not there to create and sell technology.

IBM is a technology company, Basho is a technology company, and boundary is a technology company. Because of the hardware and software business, Apple is also a technology company. But in terms of total business (including music, movies, books), Apple is not a technology company. Google and Amazon make money by selling technology and using technology to sell advertising, so they are also technology companies.

Simple is not a technology company, they use and develop technology, but provide banking services, through the banking business to make money. Zappos is also not a technology company that uses and develops technology, but earns money by people buying shoes. Technology may still be our business more efficient, or give us competitive advantage, but it is not our product. Interest in technology may improve our corporate culture, but we do not sell technology.

To be rude, sticking feathers on your butt doesn't mean you're a chicken, with engineers and data scientists don't say you're a tech company. Owning these employees is only because the company you run needs to write code to make the operation more efficient.

The definition of a technology company does not mean that only "corporate" technology companies are "real" technology companies, and many companies make money by selling technology to consumers. But there are also a lot of companies selling real products through technology companies because they sell their products on the Internet.

But the white note is that the definition of a technology company is not a standard of value. I'm not saying that tech companies are good, other types of companies are bad, and vice versa. I mean, they are different, investors, executives, especially the media, need to be treated differently. Because technology companies trade through applied Science. In order to make your business more persuasive, it is necessary to understand science.

New terminology

The two terms "technology companies" and "technology start-ups" are overused and extend their effectiveness. Calling all growth companies "technology companies" is equivalent to calling industrial-era enterprises "factory companies", it is prepared to describe a certain side of the business, but can not fully outline the business scope of the enterprise, it is certainly not accurate expression of the long-term market performance of the enterprise, which is not free to advertise a company's main reason.

I'm not sure what terminology is best used to describe a fast-growing business today. Words such as "subversive enterprise" (disruptive businesses) were thrown out at a start-up, but the term was too large and "start-up" was too small and widely used. Now it is necessary to create a new vocabulary to represent this meaning, and perhaps we need to use simple "enterprise" (businesses) terminology to represent those enterprises that use it in creative ways.

It is possible that only sociologists and historians will discuss "technology" from the perspective, a vague word that explains how people work the world. A wide range of cultural changes takes some time. As a starting point, the corporate world seems to be a good place to erase the magic dust (magic dust), and everything is beginning to become clear.