[pudakai]

I think a software-centric company is more in the "technology" company mold if they have secret sauce somewhere in their apps that give them an edge and the implementation of said secret sauce is not necessarily something that is obvious from the end effect of their app(s).

That is, you couldn't just hand a spec of the company's app to another group of generic developers with the full expectation that it could be reliably replicated in due course.

So some of the magic is in the underlying algorithms - this is what I call a technology driven company, as opposed to a market driven company, wherein the magic is in recognized some business opportunity in the market and applying rather mundane, if laborious, software solutions to them.

This is a spectrum, few, if any companies, are purely one or the other.

Another good test is whether the engineers are considered a profit or a cost center and how the company treats them. This applies more to bigger, established companies rather than smaller companies that may have been started up by engineers even if they are fundamentally market driven.