It always takes almost as many people to properly maintain a solution as it did to build it, there is no "done" state where the can get rid of the developers. I

It always takes almost as many people to properly maintain a solution as it did to build it, there is no "done" state where the can get rid of the developers. It was accepted as far back as the mythical man month that maintenance is where the vast bulk of software costs are. ... accepted by companies run by people who read the Mythical Man Month. Then there's the rest of the corporate world. These things you say are absolutely true, and yet not a day goes by that a company isn't learning that lesson, quite expensively--or better yet, failing to learn that lesson over and over.