| ▲ | wavemode 8 hours ago |
| The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves. But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision. |
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| ▲ | Nextgrid 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Software is never "finished" Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit. |
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| ▲ | array_key_first 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The number of customers is, effectively, infinite though. YouTube continues to be engineered and continues to grow. It could have, realistically, been finished over a decade ago. But they repeated branch out into new markets with new features, and that seems to work from them. | | |
| ▲ | Nextgrid 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The new features are an order of magnitude less complexity to build than the main feature - hosting video at scale, which is complete and just requires maintenance. | | |
| ▲ | paganel 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > hosting video at scale, I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off. | | |
| ▲ | Nextgrid an hour ago | parent [-] | | Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part. Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier. |
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| ▲ | gitgud 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There’s also the much more common case of a competitor coming in with a similar product that has a few more features matching the customers’ requirements… which explains the endless product development treadmill that companies find themselves on. Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software | | | |
| ▲ | wavemode 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Potential revenue growth is only as finite as your ideas (and ability to execute on them). Just look at Google. They could have stopped writing new software at any point and been just fine. But in the long run they'd have missed out on trillions of dollars. As with everything in business, it comes down to risk/reward. Not every risk pays off, but some do. | | |
| ▲ | Nextgrid an hour ago | parent [-] | | But for every outlier that can perpetually keep unlocking new revenue streams with more features, there's probably 100 companies that burn themselves out trying to do the same and end up sold for pennies on the dollar. The key is knowing when to stop. Unfortunately permanent employment does not provide an incentive for anyone involved to speak up when they think it's that time. | | |
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| ▲ | swat535 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth. I suppose you could build a simple, small app and leave it on "maintenance" (even then, it's going to be difficult due to crumbling infra) but real world products don't work that way. Companies want to scale, add features and expand to various verticals. They also have to compete with other companies , there is regulations, compliance and never ending list of incoming features from sales, marketing and customers. Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. Unless you are able to curb the corporate greed, you will need to grow your engineering team. | | |
| ▲ | Nextgrid an hour ago | parent [-] | | > The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth. There's only so much growth you can achieve in any vertical - the key is to realize when you've hit that limit and cut your losses. Unfortunately as a company employee you have no incentive to do that. I doubt Vimeo would've sold if there was still lots of growth potential on the table. They've exhausted it, and for various factors were unable to cut costs internally. Bending Spoons evaluated the situation and determined they can still extract a certain amount of profit by massively cutting costs - they gave chunk of said expected profit to the current owners, and are now implementing said strategy. > Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. The decline of Twitter has all to do with Musk's politics and lack of any kind of strategy of the product (makes sense if you see it as his personal mouthpiece rather than a business). Tech-wise it seems to be working well enough. Cutting 80% of expensive engineering staff for a 1% drop in uptime of a non-critical service with no SLAs is a no-brainer. |
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| ▲ | f33d5173 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The businesses they acquire are ones whose revenue has not appreciably grown in many years. They are being sold because the prior owner does not believe they can improve the business any more. Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like. They don't bother investing in the businesses they purchase because they believe, like the previous owner believed, that there is no more juice to squeeze from that particular lemon. |
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| ▲ | Etheryte 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm not really sure this argument makes sense. Plenty of software I've built is finished, it does the thing I need it to do and I haven't touched it in years. Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context. |
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| ▲ | wavemode 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context. You could make this statement about anything. "Building a new hospital wing just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time", "Adding an extra drive-thru lane just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time". The point is that it's not "just because", it's because you believe it can grow your revenue. On the other hand, if you don't believe that, then don't invest. Nobody's saying you have to. If you think my comment is saying that, you've misread it. |
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| ▲ | daemin 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It is absolutely true that software can be finished, it's just that software appears to be dead if it hasn't had any work done on it for years. You don't need to keep adding features and changing the software ad infinitum. Just like with your building analogy and with other car analogies presented here, software does need some maintanence every now and again to keep it up to date - with security fixes, compiling to a newer platform, integrating fixes from dependencies, etc. And yes while buildings may be finished they stil require regular maintance if they are used. |
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| ▲ | Nextgrid an hour ago | parent [-] | | My argument is that the maintenance overhead of a finished product (or car, or building) should require much less effort than what it takes to build it - otherwise you should seek a refund from the original manufacturer(s). |
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