Low reproduction costs seems like a 90s thing. If you are building proprietary, not-for-sale software, then low reproduction costs have nothing to do with exce

Low reproduction costs seems like a 90s thing. If you are building proprietary, not-for-sale software, then low reproduction costs have nothing to do with excess value. Ditto if you're building cloud-y/online services. On the cost side, too, software comes with extremely high maintenance costs that are often not accounted for ahead of time. These are so high that there had better be enormous excess value in the production and use of software regardless of the relevance of reproduction costs. The real value of software lies in making the impossible possible. Automation -made possible in the extreme by software- is extremely valuable. Even beyond automation, there are things humans simply cannot do, and even things that mechanical devices alone simply cannot do as well as software-aided ones. It's hard to put a price on making impossible things possible.