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This is a complete misinterpretation of the concept. The only economy of scale that matters in software is that (in theory, barring certain scaling consideratio
by sp527 10y ago
This is a complete misinterpretation of the concept. The only economy of scale that matters in software is that (in theory, barring certain scaling considerations which are in any case becoming more abstracted out thanks to IaaS) the same program can be run to support 10s of millions of users. Each additional unit costs very little to produce (serve it up via a CDN, some amount of network calls, processing and data storage over the lifetime of a user).
- henrik_w 10y agoMy read of the article is that he argues that software development doesn't have economy of scale - which I agree with.
- sp527 10y agoFair point but that's neither what the title says nor what he wants you to believe. This is clickbait. And technically what I described is an economy of scale wrt software development the same way the assembly line corresponds to car production. Software dev benefits from fast, cheap distribution of a product that can be duplicated easily because otherwise a developer would need to rewrite the software each time and deliver it by hand to users.
- venomsnake 10y agoThat is obviously true - double the codebase and you need four time the resources to maintain it.
- rogersm 10y agoBut the issue is not that this happens because this is software development. The reason is software is a job in which cost increase is linearly related to manpower. There are no silver bullets that can magically reduce the number of people needed. Also increasing number of people makes things even worse as communication problems increase, but I think all agree on that. But the main problem with the article is that milk is always the same: in a glass or in a tank car. Software is completely different: more functionality require more lines of code that increases people... and cost.
- Eridrus 10y agoArguing against there being economies of scale in development is a straw man, no-one has thought this for a long time, the mythical man month was published decades ago.
- svantana 10y agoExactly. Scaling a housing business means building more houses, not adding more stories to the one house you're building. And since the marginal cost of software is so low, it naturally tends to a winner-take-all market, which is an interesting counterpoint to the "get small" advice in the OP.