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There is also a ton of legal and compliance complexity. Imagine you sell things in 100 countries -- whether it's apps in an app store, or games, or movies, or
by _skel 4y ago
There is also a ton of legal and compliance complexity.
Imagine you sell things in 100 countries -- whether it's apps in an app store, or games, or movies, or physical goods. Now you have at least 100 legal and regulatory regimes to deal with around pricing, credit card stuff in general, refunds, age verification for regulated content, advertising restrictions, EULAs, GDPR, etc. In the United States alone there are 50 legal systems to deal with. Plus there are tons of localization and internationalization issues.
An enormous amount of work is needed to get all that stuff right and not be sued or fined out of existence. It's not just work for lawyers, it's work for all the software teams who have to implement the business logic to tailor the user experience for each set of customers and keep everything in legal bounds. Simple mistakes can cause your company to break the law, so everything needs to be reviewed extensively, and approved by a large number of people.
No company with such concerns can maintain per-employee productivity at the level of a startup.
- silvestrov 4y agoNot only legal: 100 countries makes close to 100 different ways of taxing stuff, e.g. different VAT rules. Different rules for what must be specified on an invoice and how often you must invoice customers. So finance part also gets really complicated.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoI was on a 1.5 year project related to SAP / ERP systems, entirely related to automated invoicing to LATAM and Eastern Europe countries. We spent a lot of time -- like A LOT of time -- on tiny things like how some countries use single or double quotations (e.g. guillemets « », or bottom quotes like „hello"), or how some countries use . and , differently for writing numbers ($1,999.99 vs 1.999,99). Seems dead-simple, but multiply that out across many different countries, regulations, taxes, and systems and we ended up with a core team of roughly 15 hammering away at this; factor in different stakeholders, managers, contractors, vendors, etc. and maybe 150 people worked to fix these otherwise simplistic issues.
- twblalock 4y agoDon't forget the legal team that has to deal with your company getting sued if you make a simple, honest mistake somewhere in this complex process!