You could say the same about the UX for any company that sells primarily online. I think the author's point is that just depending on a website as a critical part of your business doesn't make your business a technology business, anymore than having a fleet of delivery trucks makes a furniture store a transportation company.
If a furniture company is unable to function without having an in-house fleet of trucks (as opposed to outsourcing it to a transportation company and/or contracted drivers), then they are really a logistics and transportation company (which could readily start selling or transporting other goods, if they so wished).
If whether or not they did this in house didn't make a visible impact on their growth rate, they would still be a purely furniture company.
Pre-AWS Amazon.com, on the other hand, was an entirely different beast: they built a highly scalable, relevant (they built out a whole division in Palo Alto devoted to machine learning and search relevance), web application. This would be akin to a furniture company building their own trucks (even if on somebody else's chassis).
Likewise, Google doesn't just display advertising they build their own advertising technology. If they merely used banner advertising, they would be (at _most_ a) $100 million company, and not a $200 billion one.
If a furniture company is unable to function without having an in-house fleet of trucks...then they are really a logistics and transportation company...
Perhaps, but we would still refer to them as a furniture company until they started selling something else. The author's point is that the term 'tech company' has become a meaningless distinction when the 'tech' in question has become ubiquitous.
