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You joke, but when have you ever heard of a software company calling their product complete, firing most of their developers, and moving to maintenance mode? B
by treis 8y ago
You joke, but when have you ever heard of a software company calling their product complete, firing most of their developers, and moving to maintenance mode? Building a product and making money by selling it is somewhat of a novelty in the hypergrowth VC world of software.
- jrochkind1 8y agoI bet we could find tons of other private equity examples. It's how they do. When they aren't firing most staff to then try to re-sell the company instead.
- opportune 8y agoAs a developer this obviously sucks but this seems to be pretty efficient from a high level view. If all the low hanging fruit is done and all future development is just adding features with continually diminishing returns, it makes sense to just go into maintenance mode, extract your profits, and let your developers go work on something else
- u801e 8y agoAnd, then, after years have passed and the hardware it's running on starts failing, developers have to scramble to update components to a version that's actually supported.
- johannes1234321 8y agoBy that time the money is already made from those for who it's cheaper to stay than moving away ... so you can buy the next company with a dying product, milk their customers and move on.
- pas 8y agoMaintenance. Real maintenance is cheap. New SDK comes out, make it compile, do the necessary refactor. That's it. Minimal team, no real deadlines, just pure throughput.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI agree about calling a product complete. MS Office and Windows were probably pretty complete in the early 2000s. But instead of firing the devs it would be nice if they put them to work on something new.