A few days ago I would have agreed whole heartedly. Now, after reading the article about the formation of AWS I’m not so sure.[1] It seems that Amazon (and ot

A few days ago I would have agreed whole heartedly. Now, after reading the article about the formation of AWS I’m not so sure.[1] It seems that Amazon (and others such as Google) have achieved economies of scale in development with internal services and well organized APIs. Certainly much of this is being exposed externally for profit, but it does seem to indicate that well designed software has economies of scale for the development of future software. Certainly one monolith application with a team of a thousand starting from scratch is a bad idea, but once internal APIs and services exist, these definitely seem to aid in the rapid development of future software products for a company, which seems like economies of scale to me. Bloated bureaucracies and bad processes can negatively impact any company in any industry, not just software. Some of the article’s logic doesn’t seem to differentiate software development from anything else, such as “working in the large increases risk”. So while a large monolith application is risky, building a hundred million widgets is risky too. Better to iterate and start with a prototype and expand, but the same goes for other industries too: better to prototype and market test your widget before mass production. Seems to me like the article is talking more about lean and agile and process in general than about economies of scale. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022915