Software gets more expensive over time when you write it like spaghetti coded crap in a "move fast and break things" environment where you build so much technical debt that you can't touch anything without breaking 5 other things, and suddenly even simple changes take hundreds of developer hours, which you don't have because half your team is fighting bugs.
Luckily all of our most critical services run on well-developed platforms that get the time and resources they need to be durable and maintainable over time. (biggest /s I've ever written)
One consequence of monopoly capitalism is businesses pursuing growth in revenue more aggressively than growth in user base.
When the market is saturated, all you can do to pursue growth is to increase unit margin. This eventually leads to production of "fictitious capital" as a stand in for real capital (as paper assets cost virtually nothing to produce).
Das Kapital goes into lengthy detail about this process. Specifically, the "how much does it cost to make a coat" chapter gets into it in (exhaustive) detail.
It's about market capture and the resulting lack of choices allowing market holders to maximize profits by degrading product performance. This can occur even when the product has no price.
That's part of enshittification. Step 2 of enshittification is to entice in business buyers with low prices and changes that meet their needs. Step 3 is to cut costs and start price gouging to maximize profits.
I was renting a water heater. It had been installed in my house in the early 1980s. And the rental contract had been handed down from home owner to home owner.
But there was never an attempt at maintenance, even upon request I got told "there's no need, there's nothing to maintain on it." but they kept increasing the rental cost year over year "because of inflation". It had been paid off for decades! What do you mean you need to charge more? What exactly am I paying for? My water heater is just a number in your books. You have zero costs for it!
I've since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. For a while I wasn't aware that you could just buy a heater. So I just gritted my teeth and paid up.
But my point was the weird and pointless increase of fees.
I've read your response to others that you bought the replacement outright, but I wonder if the original renter was about to sell their house and needed a water heater. Saddling the future with this debt could be cheaper than buying it outright.
I don't know. It might be that it was usual at that time to rent those things than to buy them. My parents also had a rented water heater when they owned a home, which is why I didn't even think twice about it.
I don't know how expensive those boilers were in the 80s.
Probably this… if you’re not going to benefit from the new water heater, you’d probably be tempted to pass it off to the next owner. Renting is a way to do that.
I have since replaced it with a water heater I bought outright. Sadly a heat pump isn't an option in my home. So it's a simple electric 80liter water heater.
There was another thread recently about what happened in your life that made you no longer feel like a child. I think for me one of those things was realizing that the price of things has very little to do at all with the cost of creating that thing.
I buy a fair bit of meat. At my nearest butcher scotch fillet steak (rib eye, I think, in American English) is $35 per kilo. It is from a meat packing plant with reasonably cheap labor, with expensive equipment amortized over thousands of cattle a year, cutting up cows all day
At my next nearest butcher it's $60/kg. It's cut off a cow carcass hanging in the back of the shop by a butcher with a knife
Nah, the cost of labor + materials + distribution is the minimum price of an item. The actual price in practice will be that price + whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.
What determines the premium they can get away with is whether or not alternative goods exist and whether or not the consumers are informed of them, motivated to seek them out, and capable of making the switch.
This is actually the reason why taxes don't increase luxury item costs as the cost is set to the market demand rather than from supply. In fact, the benefits from taxes help people afford more products in a virtuous cycle. It's also the reason tariffs or taxes on raw goods are so bad as you actually are creating dead weight loss and driving down demand which can be useful or detrimental depending on why someone needs that product.
Absolutely they do, which is why the competition could not compete. Once the whole market is dominated by a few companies, it lets them get a little more creative with how they price things, and a little lazier with their coding practices.
In an e-mail to [Steve] Jobs, Cue attributed Random House’s capitulation in part to 'the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store this week.'"
Well we all knew those things happened but it's the first time I see proof.
They never run out of stuff to add. Give any company enough resources and you would see weird and completely unrelated stuff attached to their products. I kid you not, I can apparently get a vet appointment in a taxi app, and my bank is now selling clothes and.... car parts? While the bank part of the app literally has no option to filter out only incoming transactions. Priorities, I guess...
The problem (outside of competence and the fact that most people only really understand one tool) is that they're deliberately architected in ways that make it difficult to operate on them the same way. They're not just different function calls; they want you to make completely different assumptions about how to do things.
This is kinda flawed. Most businesses need to recoup their investment, and some upfront costs going away is part of the plan to profitability.
I think this guy is confusing all "software businesses" and fortune 100 tech companies.
Edit: there are ton of businesses that make software, don't become unicorns or make billions, that survive on a product suiting some niche. To say "software companies" take crazy margins is stupid. Big tech is the issue, not software (see linux)
The markets jumped 30% this year alone, even in the face of a higher than recently normal interest rate.
The problem isn't recoupment of losses, it's an expectation of skyrocketing future growth.
The end result is a lending market chasing unicorns, quarter after quarter, as businesses promising increasingly ludicrous returns to lure those investors in.
Youre describing the fortune 100 tech companies, as I said.
Plenty of smaller startups survived, still develop, support and improve their software very far from everything you're describing here. Should maintainers be paid less and less as the project ages?
Software shouldn't get cheaper as it ages. Big tech companies should stop milking monopolies off tax payer funds. It has nothing to do with the cost / lifecycle of software
But like idk. I feel like cost going down on physical items makes sense to a point. But I've hosted a few services and that shit got harder and more involved the longer it went on. Maybe that's just a skill issue tho. Love to hear your thoughts
I got server space pretty cheap recently. There's a lot of competition in that space and they compete on price as well as quality
So whatever performance level you need doesn't cost a lot more than the fraction of hardware lifetime you're buying
"Harder" depends on what services you're offering. Email is hard now; web is no harder (though web sites are as hard as you want them to be), hosting a game server is as easy as it ever has been
Yes it gets harder, but it doesn't get 10x harder with 10x users. It should scale somewhat logarithmically. With millions of users that makes it still much cheaper to operate per user than with a thousand.
I host an ever growing system in the cloud. Everything you build needs to be maintained and monitored, and the more users you have, the more features they demand.
You can still spread cost out across more users, but it's not like the software is just "done" and sits there being used
Everyone likes to pile on, but do the costs go down? Cloud isn’t run in a vacuum. You’ve got a data center full of employees keeping the place running. The data center has electricity and cooling costs. The company runs an HR department. The electric company raises prices. The hardware the “cloud” lives on wears out and needs to be replaced. All of these costs involve humans and humans demand annual raises to keep up with inflation. Also, investors that gave you the money to build the cloud and keep it running demand a return on their investment. They don’t just give out their money for free. So, I can’t help but feel this is not an accurate view of the world.