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The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can a

The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves. But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision.

f33d5173 9mo ago
The businesses they acquire are ones whose revenue has not appreciably grown in many years. They are being sold because the prior owner does not believe they can improve the business any more. Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like. They don't bother investing in the businesses they purchase because they believe, like the previous owner believed, that there is no more juice to squeeze from that particular lemon.
- specialist 9mo ago
  Just like Computer Associates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like And the ones who helped make Vimeo what it is? left out in the cold to fend for themselves. This is why loyalty is dead. Maybe if this billion dollar aquisition benefitted the workers there'd be less hard feelings, but that's not how capitalism works.
  - senordevnyc 9mo ago
    And the ones who helped make Vimeo what it is? left out in the cold to fend for themselves. This is such a bizarre mentality to me. When you sell your car, do you send a cut of the money to your mechanic?
Nextgrid 9mo ago
> Software is never "finished" Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.
- wavemode 9mo ago
  Potential revenue growth is only as finite as your ideas (and ability to execute on them). Just look at Google. They could have stopped writing new software at any point and been just fine. But in the long run they'd have missed out on trillions of dollars. As with everything in business, it comes down to risk/reward. Not every risk pays off, but some do.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    But for every outlier that can perpetually keep unlocking new revenue streams with more features, there's probably 100 companies that burn themselves out trying to do the same and end up sold for pennies on the dollar. The key is knowing when to stop. Unfortunately permanent employment does not provide an incentive for anyone involved to speak up when they think it's that time.
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      >for every outlier that can perpetually keep unlocking new revenue streams with more features, there's probably 100 companies that burn themselves out trying to do the same and end up sold for pennies on the dollar. Okay. Most businesses also fail. Is that a reason for existing ones to stop growing?
- gitgud 9mo ago
  There’s also the much more common case of a competitor coming in with a similar product that has a few more features matching the customers’ requirements… which explains the endless product development treadmill that companies find themselves on. Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software
Etheryte 9mo ago
I'm not really sure this argument makes sense. Plenty of software I've built is finished, it does the thing I need it to do and I haven't touched it in years. Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context.
- wavemode 9mo ago
  > Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context. You could make this statement about anything. "Building a new hospital wing just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time", "Adding an extra drive-thru lane just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time". The point is that it's not "just because", it's because you believe it can grow your revenue. On the other hand, if you don't believe that, then don't invest. Nobody's saying you have to. If you think my comment is saying that, you've misread it.
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > You could make this statement about anything. "Building a new hospital wing just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time", "Adding an extra drive-thru lane just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time". The point is that it's not "just because", it's because you believe it can grow your revenue. You can, but do you really need the same sized team to add an extra lane to a drive-through as you needed to build the entire restaurant's building, kitchens, etc? Do you need the same sized team to add a new wing to a building as the team that built the existing building(s)?
  - senordevnyc 9mo ago
    What kind of hospital keeps a construction team on staff so they can constantly be building new wings?
  - Etheryte 9mo ago
    Hospitals expand because they either already don't or they project they won't meet demand. It's the same story with drive-thrus. These are things that are measured and analyzed. Adding features in the blind hope that more features equals more revenue is exactly how companies stagnate and burn. There's plenty of successful software products out there that are finished as far as the feature set goes, you'll find they power most of the industries outside of IT.
daemin 9mo ago
It is absolutely true that software can be finished, it's just that software appears to be dead if it hasn't had any work done on it for years. You don't need to keep adding features and changing the software ad infinitum. Just like with your building analogy and with other car analogies presented here, software does need some maintanence every now and again to keep it up to date - with security fixes, compiling to a newer platform, integrating fixes from dependencies, etc. And yes while buildings may be finished they stil require regular maintance if they are used.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  My argument is that the maintenance overhead of a finished product (or car, or building) should require much less effort than what it takes to build it - otherwise you should seek a refund from the original manufacturer(s).
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    That's absolutely not true in pretty much any mid scale software. You can have a team of 5 people make the core of an app, then need 50 people to help with support for customers. scaling up is never cheap, but software scalability is really low despite that. That's not even true with a car. I'm about to spend 3000 dollars on a big repair for a car I bought 9 years ago used @ 3500. Even if you adjust for inflation we're still talking about 70% of the car's worth just to keep it running. As for a refund, the blue book value tops at 850 dollars.
    - lelanthran 9mo ago
      > I'm about to spend 3000 dollars on a big repair for a car I bought 9 years ago used @ 3500. Even if you adjust for inflation we're still talking about 70% of the car's worth just to keep it running. That's one way to run that ROI, sure, but is it correct? 1. The original $3.5k you spent is a sunk cost; you should ignore it, so your total cost of getting a running car is only $3k. 2. Even if you don't ignore it, your total bill to get a running car is $7.5k In either of the above situations, you should be comparing the cost to get a running car by fixing your existing car (either $3k or $7.5k) to the cost of getting a running car by selling it as-is (so, perhaps +$500 as a parts donor -$X for a replacement running car). Regardless of which calculus you are using, it's still going to come cheaper to fix the running car. What the car is "worth" (however you define it) is irrelevant to the calculus.
csomar 9mo ago
Buildings are never finished either that's why you have HoA fees and even with that many buildings end up in disrepair.
ben_w 9mo ago
> Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. On the contrary, it absolutely can be, in both directions. Software can absolutely be "feature complete", and in the case of many products it would have been an improvement to say "we're done now" and switch from developing new features to maintenance-only mode, dealing only with API changes and new laws. Some examples of where it should be "done" by some point include smart TVs and smart lightbulbs. I'm also old enough to remember the era of games where patches were rare and small, unlike the current experience of having to wait for Steam to install updates almost every day, and only then will allow me to see if the game I want to play and which worked yesterday now has a mandatory update that I also have to wait for (which is less often but still often enough to be annoying). Even with MacOS, while I absolutely do appreciate all the behind the scenes stuff regarding security and so on, the last time I appreciated what they did with the UI in an update, the version branding scheme was still to name releases after cats. Even as an iOS developer, although I can see what they're trying to do with SwiftUI, I find it worse than UIKit in basically every regard because the "magic" keeps not working and the "problem" it tried to solve was never (for me) a problem; with concurrency, they went from GCD to Combine which IMO was a step back, before going to async/await. "Too many features" is also a problem for the developers, as it leads to them duplicating work. For example, the background sounds feature on my phone and the one on my HomePod each has its own list of sounds, they're not just two interfaces to the same underlying app even though the HomePod's OS is a fork of tvOS which is a fork of iOS. (The other way around, the home I grew up in is now about twice the size it was when my parents bought it around 1970, judging from the Google areal view).
- dzonga 9mo ago
  we should get to the state of software being finished. then for live games etc -- release servers maybe after 7 years so people can run their own servers for games I think we can all agree 7 years is a good enough timeline for games to have milked all the revenue they need. 37Signals still have early versions of Basecamp running Jetbrains does the same thing with perpetual licenses etc SAAS does not mean software can't be finished
- jmiskovic 9mo ago
  I wish this was true. Unfortunately when the software is done, the product lifetime comes to a close soon after. Everything around the product changes and the software needs to change to keep up. Smart lightbulbs need apps to keep working and you get kicked out of app stores if you don't keep up with never-ending churn Apple and Google imposes on you. The only way to run older games is to use emulators and other 3rd party effort, that also needs to be continually updated. When you claim that any piece of software is done and completed, you've only externalized the effort required to keep it useful. I absolutely agree with your pushback against feature creep. That is unfortunately a reflection of internal corporation value system, while the successful open source projects often know where to draw the line.
soerxpso 9mo ago
> More features can always be added to software How does that make it different? More features could always be added to most buildings. You could keep adding rooms onto the side, update the floors/ceilings/walls every year to stay trendy, add a water feature, expand the basement with a tunnel network, etc.

f33d5173 9mo ago

The businesses they acquire are ones whose revenue has not appreciably grown in many years. They are being sold because the prior owner does not believe they can improve the business any more. Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like. They don't bother investing in the businesses they purchase because they believe, like the previous owner believed, that there is no more juice to squeeze from that particular lemon.

specialist 9mo ago
Just like Computer Associates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Associates
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>Any profit bending spoons earns they can run off and invest in another business if they like And the ones who helped make Vimeo what it is? left out in the cold to fend for themselves. This is why loyalty is dead. Maybe if this billion dollar aquisition benefitted the workers there'd be less hard feelings, but that's not how capitalism works.
- senordevnyc 9mo ago
  And the ones who helped make Vimeo what it is? left out in the cold to fend for themselves. This is such a bizarre mentality to me. When you sell your car, do you send a cut of the money to your mechanic?

Nextgrid 9mo ago

> Software is never "finished" Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.

wavemode 9mo ago
Potential revenue growth is only as finite as your ideas (and ability to execute on them). Just look at Google. They could have stopped writing new software at any point and been just fine. But in the long run they'd have missed out on trillions of dollars. As with everything in business, it comes down to risk/reward. Not every risk pays off, but some do.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  But for every outlier that can perpetually keep unlocking new revenue streams with more features, there's probably 100 companies that burn themselves out trying to do the same and end up sold for pennies on the dollar. The key is knowing when to stop. Unfortunately permanent employment does not provide an incentive for anyone involved to speak up when they think it's that time.
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    >for every outlier that can perpetually keep unlocking new revenue streams with more features, there's probably 100 companies that burn themselves out trying to do the same and end up sold for pennies on the dollar. Okay. Most businesses also fail. Is that a reason for existing ones to stop growing?
gitgud 9mo ago
There’s also the much more common case of a competitor coming in with a similar product that has a few more features matching the customers’ requirements… which explains the endless product development treadmill that companies find themselves on. Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software

Etheryte 9mo ago

I'm not really sure this argument makes sense. Plenty of software I've built is finished, it does the thing I need it to do and I haven't touched it in years. Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context.

wavemode 9mo ago
> Adding features just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time, doubly so in a business context. You could make this statement about anything. "Building a new hospital wing just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time", "Adding an extra drive-thru lane just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time". The point is that it's not "just because", it's because you believe it can grow your revenue. On the other hand, if you don't believe that, then don't invest. Nobody's saying you have to. If you think my comment is saying that, you've misread it.
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > You could make this statement about anything. "Building a new hospital wing just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time", "Adding an extra drive-thru lane just because is not a useful way to spend anyone's time". The point is that it's not "just because", it's because you believe it can grow your revenue. You can, but do you really need the same sized team to add an extra lane to a drive-through as you needed to build the entire restaurant's building, kitchens, etc? Do you need the same sized team to add a new wing to a building as the team that built the existing building(s)?
- senordevnyc 9mo ago
  What kind of hospital keeps a construction team on staff so they can constantly be building new wings?
- Etheryte 9mo ago
  Hospitals expand because they either already don't or they project they won't meet demand. It's the same story with drive-thrus. These are things that are measured and analyzed. Adding features in the blind hope that more features equals more revenue is exactly how companies stagnate and burn. There's plenty of successful software products out there that are finished as far as the feature set goes, you'll find they power most of the industries outside of IT.

daemin 9mo ago

It is absolutely true that software can be finished, it's just that software appears to be dead if it hasn't had any work done on it for years. You don't need to keep adding features and changing the software ad infinitum. Just like with your building analogy and with other car analogies presented here, software does need some maintanence every now and again to keep it up to date - with security fixes, compiling to a newer platform, integrating fixes from dependencies, etc. And yes while buildings may be finished they stil require regular maintance if they are used.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
My argument is that the maintenance overhead of a finished product (or car, or building) should require much less effort than what it takes to build it - otherwise you should seek a refund from the original manufacturer(s).
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  That's absolutely not true in pretty much any mid scale software. You can have a team of 5 people make the core of an app, then need 50 people to help with support for customers. scaling up is never cheap, but software scalability is really low despite that. That's not even true with a car. I'm about to spend 3000 dollars on a big repair for a car I bought 9 years ago used @ 3500. Even if you adjust for inflation we're still talking about 70% of the car's worth just to keep it running. As for a refund, the blue book value tops at 850 dollars.
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > I'm about to spend 3000 dollars on a big repair for a car I bought 9 years ago used @ 3500. Even if you adjust for inflation we're still talking about 70% of the car's worth just to keep it running. That's one way to run that ROI, sure, but is it correct? 1. The original $3.5k you spent is a sunk cost; you should ignore it, so your total cost of getting a running car is only $3k. 2. Even if you don't ignore it, your total bill to get a running car is $7.5k In either of the above situations, you should be comparing the cost to get a running car by fixing your existing car (either $3k or $7.5k) to the cost of getting a running car by selling it as-is (so, perhaps +$500 as a parts donor -$X for a replacement running car). Regardless of which calculus you are using, it's still going to come cheaper to fix the running car. What the car is "worth" (however you define it) is irrelevant to the calculus.

csomar 9mo ago

Buildings are never finished either that's why you have HoA fees and even with that many buildings end up in disrepair.

ben_w 9mo ago

> Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. On the contrary, it absolutely can be, in both directions. Software can absolutely be "feature complete", and in the case of many products it would have been an improvement to say "we're done now" and switch from developing new features to maintenance-only mode, dealing only with API changes and new laws. Some examples of where it should be "done" by some point include smart TVs and smart lightbulbs. I'm also old enough to remember the era of games where patches were rare and small, unlike the current experience of having to wait for Steam to install updates almost every day, and only then will allow me to see if the game I want to play and which worked yesterday now has a mandatory update that I also have to wait for (which is less often but still often enough to be annoying). Even with MacOS, while I absolutely do appreciate all the behind the scenes stuff regarding security and so on, the last time I appreciated what they did with the UI in an update, the version branding scheme was still to name releases after cats. Even as an iOS developer, although I can see what they're trying to do with SwiftUI, I find it worse than UIKit in basically every regard because the "magic" keeps not working and the "problem" it tried to solve was never (for me) a problem; with concurrency, they went from GCD to Combine which IMO was a step back, before going to async/await. "Too many features" is also a problem for the developers, as it leads to them duplicating work. For example, the background sounds feature on my phone and the one on my HomePod each has its own list of sounds, they're not just two interfaces to the same underlying app even though the HomePod's OS is a fork of tvOS which is a fork of iOS. (The other way around, the home I grew up in is now about twice the size it was when my parents bought it around 1970, judging from the Google areal view).

dzonga 9mo ago
we should get to the state of software being finished. then for live games etc -- release servers maybe after 7 years so people can run their own servers for games I think we can all agree 7 years is a good enough timeline for games to have milked all the revenue they need. 37Signals still have early versions of Basecamp running Jetbrains does the same thing with perpetual licenses etc SAAS does not mean software can't be finished
jmiskovic 9mo ago
I wish this was true. Unfortunately when the software is done, the product lifetime comes to a close soon after. Everything around the product changes and the software needs to change to keep up. Smart lightbulbs need apps to keep working and you get kicked out of app stores if you don't keep up with never-ending churn Apple and Google imposes on you. The only way to run older games is to use emulators and other 3rd party effort, that also needs to be continually updated. When you claim that any piece of software is done and completed, you've only externalized the effort required to keep it useful. I absolutely agree with your pushback against feature creep. That is unfortunately a reflection of internal corporation value system, while the successful open source projects often know where to draw the line.

soerxpso 9mo ago

> More features can always be added to software How does that make it different? More features could always be added to most buildings. You could keep adding rooms onto the side, update the floors/ceilings/walls every year to stay trendy, add a water feature, expand the basement with a tunnel network, etc.