> 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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gitgud 3 hours ago | parent | 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

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array_key_first 2 hours ago | parent | prev | 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.

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Nextgrid 2 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 2 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.

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swat535 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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wavemode 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.