[oofbey]

Off-topic, but how did Netflix manage to get itself inserted into the FAANG acronym anyway? Their impact on the tech industry is trivial compared to all the others. Sure, if you just take out the N it's offensive, but we could have said "GAFA" or "FAAMG" would be more accurate to include Microsoft in their place.

[jedberg]

FAANG was created by the TV personality Jim Cramer to talk about high growth tech stocks. At the time Netflix was doubling every year. It was based purely on finance.

It's now been taken over by the tech industry to be shorthand for places that are highly selective in their hiring and tend to work on cutting edge tech at scale.

That being said, the impact of Netflix on tech is pretty big. They pioneered using the cloud to run at massive scale.

[oofbey]

> They pioneered using the cloud to run at massive scale.

Which is to say they were AWS's biggest early customer? Doesn't really seem like Netflix should get the credit for that one.

[jedberg]

It was a lot more than that. They developed systems and techniques that even Amazon adopted and are still adopting to this day. They also created a ton of open source tools for other people to use the cloud:

https://netflix.github.io

Netflix tech even spawned a company to sell their open source tools:

https://www.armory.io

And they codified the entire practice of Chaos Engineering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering

[hetspookjee]

That stockphoto on the front page of armory.io manages to trigger al kinds of spammy website triggers for me.

[patmorgan23]

They were pretty influential in refining the microservices architecture

[samhw]

> FAANG was created by the TV personality Jim Cramer to talk about high growth tech stocks. At the time Netflix was doubling every year. It was based purely on finance.

That, and FAAG had less of a ring to it.

Edit: Dammit, the GP made the same observation. Oh well, I'm keeping it.

[jedberg]

If Netflix hadn't been such high growth and not included, Cramer probably would have gone with GAAF. :)

[dljsjr]

The phrase originated w/ Jim Cramer, it refers to the 5 best performing tech stocks(or what were the best performing at the time). Nothing to do with their impact on the field from a technical perspective, just a business perspective.

[vincentmarle]

There was a point in time when FAANG offered the best compensation packages for engineers (Netflix was one of them) - so that's where the term originated from but while it's outdated in many respects (Microsoft is not included, Facebook is now Meta, Google is now Alphabet etc etc) it's still sticky for some reason.

[hbn]

> Facebook is now Meta, Google is now Alphabet

Eh, the new parent company names aren't really what people know them as still. I don't think most people are even aware that Google has a parent company.

I have a friend that works at Google, and that's what we say. I don't think him or anyone would ever say he works at Alphabet.

[oofbey]

Yeah, Meta will likely stick because Zuckerberg and crew are actively trying to run away from the dumpster fire they lit with Facebook.

But Google is still Google, and probably always will be. Just like Youtube is still Google, and Waymo is still Google.

[hbn]

I'm going out of my way to not say Meta for that exact reason. They haven't proved they deserve to shed their horrible reputation yet. They'll always be the Facebook we know and hate until they're less dystopian.

[whimsicalism]

Microsoft in 2022 does not compensate as well as any of those. Microsoft in 2021 only out-compensated Amazon.

[errantmind]

I think the acronym gained prominence before Microsoft's recent 'commitment' to open source. Netflix also seemed to be doing really interesting things scaling out 'disruption' to video delivery at the time. It stuck

[yukinon]

FAANG was never about impact on tech industry. Otherwise, MSFT would be part of FAANG. Instead, it's directly related to (1) stock price and (2) compensation.

[TacticalCoder]

> "FAAMG" would be more accurate to include Microsoft in their place

In Europe you nearly always see "GNAFAM", which includes Microsoft too. It's certainly weird to exclude MSFT, worth at times more than Amazon+Meta+Netflix combined.

[cordite]

Netflix has contributed a lot to Java micro services, see Eureka and Hystrix.

[troiskaer]

as well as to ML - Netflix Prize (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize) and Metaflow (https://github.com/Netflix/metaflow)

[oofbey]

No question they've done some things that have had some impact on others in the industry. But none of them are particularly important. It's all relative. Companies like Twitter, Uber, AirBnb have all released open source projects or figured things out how to solve hard problems in ways that others have emulated.

But for every other one of the FAA(N)G companies, I can barely work a day as a developer without touching every one of their technologies. Yeah, Netflix got into ML years before most, but the netflix prize exists as a distant cautionary memory, and as an ML professional, I'd literally never heard of metaflow before. Just sayin'.

[troiskaer]

> But none of them are particularly important

Nowhere was the argument made that somehow Netflix was more influential than Twitter/Uber/AirBnB, but your counter-argument that somehow it's less influential because you haven't heard of/used some projects directly holds no ground.

[samhw]

> your counter-argument that somehow it's less influential because you haven't heard of/used some projects directly holds no ground

Oh come on, they are indisputably right that Microsoft, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, hell, even Cloudflare are more technically influential than Netflix is.

Apple and Google would make anyone's top 5, that's his point. No argument about it. Their products collectively dominate anyone's life, along with MSFT. Netflix is maybe in your top 10, top 20 for sure, but it's not up there as one of the few 'platform that everyone's lives are built on' techcos.

(Like, Netflix vs Microsoft? Seriously? For that matter, Amazon probably wouldn't be in my top 5 either, and not only because it's not mainly a tech company. I s'pose it depends how you define 'Amazon', and if you include AWS. But for Netflix there's just no argument that they win a spot there.)

[troiskaer]

What's your argument for Twitter/Uber/AirBnB being indisputably more technologically influential than Netflix? And let's please talk facts rather than opinions.

[tempest_]

All the cool kids say GAMMA now.

[oofbey]

Not MAGMA?

[svachalek]

Now I can't get Dr Evil saying MAGMA out of my mind.

[ystad]

Too hot I say :)

[aczerepinski]

What is the G?

[oofbey]

Those who used to do no evil, but gave up on the idea as not profitable enough.