It's both! I like the garden analogy. We want a garden to be pleasant and nice, but we'd also like it to be easy to maintain. A successful garden is about find

It's both! I like the garden analogy. We want a garden to be pleasant and nice, but we'd also like it to be easy to maintain. A successful garden is about finding that balance between plants that mostly take care of themselves and a few unique things that might take a bit more care but make the garden special. Daffodils require no maintenance at all but they only appear briefly and everyone has them. A garden full of daffodils isn't special. Software is there to be useful, to provide some business value. But it can't all be boring old daffodils. There has to be something your business is doing that is different from any other business, otherwise why are you even writing software? So, yes, there is a liability in the sense that you need to tend to whatever garden you decide to grow, but there is a definite asset in the sense that it is delivering value to the business. It's all about trying to manage the size of the liability given the size of the asset.