> It's funny how everyone (especially here on HN) accepted (and expected) extremely high profit margins from software businesses

Because software you build it once and can resell it as much as you want, a stick of RAM is only sold once.

> The same was reflected in engineering salaries, with software engineering salaries being often a multiple of hardware engineering ones.

Arguably software is much more difficult to build because it is never complete.

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cycomanic 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Because software you build it once and can resell it as much as you want, a stick of RAM is only sold once.

Yes exactly, and theoretically if there was a functioning market that should have driven prices way down, because the marginal cost to enter the market is so low. However, the non-functioning anti-trust laws as well as the expansion of ip laws as allowed a few enormous corporations to essentially control the market and keep prices up.

> Arguably software is much more difficult to build because it is never complete.

There are hardly any hardware companies where the hardware is ever complete. Disregarding the fact that many hardware products contain some form of software that needs to be updated. In pretty much any field hardware companies need to continue developing new revisions/improvements on the hardware to stay ahead of their competitors, however those revisions/improvements are significantly more complex to put into reality.

	▲	merelydev 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Yes exactly, and theoretically if there was a functioning market that should have driven prices way down, because the marginal cost to enter the market is so low. However, the non-functioning anti-trust laws as well as the expansion of ip laws as allowed a few enormous corporations to essentially control the market and keep prices up. What? Software is not expansive, most of it is free. Its just that the same code can be used by more than one user, unlike hardware. The high profit margins come from economies of scale which is greater than whats possible with hardware. > There are hardly any hardware companies where the hardware is ever complete. Disregarding the fact that many hardware products contain some form of software that needs to be updated. In pretty much any field hardware companies need to continue developing new revisions/improvements on the hardware to stay ahead of their competitors, however those revisions/improvements are significantly more complex to put into reality. Most of the deployed hardware is complete. The RAM in my PC is complete but the software running on it needs to be updated every month or so.