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> Yes, because economies of scale greatly benefit big companies. I don't think software engineering in itself benefits greatly from the economies of scale. Yes
by dunkelheit 7y ago
> Yes, because economies of scale greatly benefit big companies.
I don't think software engineering in itself benefits greatly from the economies of scale. Yes, tech giants have developed some nice internal tooling, but the cost of implementing a feature for a google engineer is probably in the same ballpark as for a startup engineer. User acquisition OTOH seems substantially cheaper for the big companies. So, economies of scale in marketing and distribution?
- emodendroket 7y agoIf they don't then why does anybody use AWS?
- wongarsu 7y agoStart-ups use AWS because with $20k-$100k in credits you can do a lot for free in the first year, and after that the cost difference usually doesn't matter. It also looks great on everyone's CV. Big companies ofc have other reasons like flexibility, needing less coordination in the company etc.
- emodendroket 7y agoIf there were no economies of scale it certainly would seem strange that it could possibly be cheaper to rent computers from Amazon than to run your own data center.
- wongarsu 7y agoRenting servers from Hetzner is a lot cheaper than using AWS. If you get your uplink figured out then running your own servers is also cheaper.
- emodendroket 7y agoSure, if you discount the administrative work to keep them up it might be.
- dunkelheit 7y agoOperating AWS and the datacenters involves massive economies of scale. Writing the software that powers AWS - not so much.
- emodendroket 7y agoYes, but since most of us (I think, anyways) are working on Web-hosted software that stuff all matters. It also matters that an Amazon or Facebook has whole teams dedicated to developer tools, operations management, and so on.