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> 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

> 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
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  Yeah, if Youtube was "finished" we wouldn't have had Youtube Red, Youtube shorts, Youtube music, etc. And yes, I am making a good case for mature software with those lovely examples. But clearly they wanted more widgets and they kept engineers who can deliver those widgets. This wasn't some unsustainable thing for Youtube as the top comment argues. And that's how most software businesses work as of now. If you remain complacent, you're slowly dying to competition. Because the demand for more still exists.
array_key_first 9mo ago
The number of customers is, effectively, infinite though. YouTube continues to be engineered and continues to grow. It could have, realistically, been finished over a decade ago. But they repeated branch out into new markets with new features, and that seems to work from them.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  The new features are an order of magnitude less complexity to build than the main feature - hosting video at scale, which is complete and just requires maintenance.
  - paganel 9mo ago
    > hosting video at scale, I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.
    - Nextgrid 9mo ago
      Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part. Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.
      - slhck 9mo ago
        That is really a bit of an oversimplification IMO. Please check, for example, the Netflix tech blog and read about what has changed in the past 10 years or so when it comes to architecting video processing and video delivery systems. There's a tremendous amount of engineering work there which advances the entire industry. For instance, it's not trivial to add live events to a VoD infrastructure at that scale — it's not like you just add a few more nodes and buy faster encoders.
swat535 9mo ago
> Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth. I suppose you could build a simple, small app and leave it on "maintenance" (even then, it's going to be difficult due to crumbling infra) but real world products don't work that way. Companies want to scale, add features and expand to various verticals. They also have to compete with other companies , there is regulations, compliance and never ending list of incoming features from sales, marketing and customers. Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. Unless you are able to curb the corporate greed, you will need to grow your engineering team.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  > The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth. There's only so much growth you can achieve in any vertical - the key is to realize when you've hit that limit and cut your losses. Unfortunately as a company employee you have no incentive to do that. I doubt Vimeo would've sold if there was still lots of growth potential on the table. They've exhausted it, and for various factors were unable to cut costs internally. Bending Spoons evaluated the situation and determined they can still extract a certain amount of profit by massively cutting costs - they gave chunk of said expected profit to the current owners, and are now implementing said strategy. > Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. The decline of Twitter has all to do with Musk's politics and lack of any kind of strategy of the product (makes sense if you see it as his personal mouthpiece rather than a business). Tech-wise it seems to be working well enough. Cutting 80% of expensive engineering staff for a 1% drop in uptime of a non-critical service with no SLAs is a no-brainer.
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  > Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. This seemed to end pretty well. He overpaid for it, but the website kept functioning without issues.
AbstractH24 9mo ago
> Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. The search engine markets is finite, so Alphabet expanded elsewhere
- ben_w 9mo ago
  > Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. Doch, even then. Back at university, we had practice sessions about our CVs and job interviews. Mine had a cliché in it, "committed to quality"*. The businessperson who was helping us figure out how to be any good at the jobs market, picked up on it with an example: Which is higher quality? A Porsche, or a go-kart? We nodded at "Porsche", as was the point. Except no; you didn't consider who the customer was. If this is for a kid who just wants to have some fun, they can't afford a Porsche, they've got no insurance, they don't know how to drive. A go-kart solves their problem, they get to have fun, a Porsche doesn't. (I'm paraphrasing, it was over 20 years ago now). * I was 19 or 20 when I wrote that, it was about as true as when ChatGPT writes the same: I didn't know any better.
  - joncrane 9mo ago
    This is a weird example because there are crappy go-karts and there are carefully designed and assembled go-karts. You can have a high quality anything: car, truck, go-kart, trailer, wagon.
    - tracker1 9mo ago
      Even then... you reach a point where any additional quality or craftsmanship offers no more value. Aesthetics can have some arbitrary value, but even then it's a matter of taste.

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

johnnyanmac 9mo ago
Yeah, if Youtube was "finished" we wouldn't have had Youtube Red, Youtube shorts, Youtube music, etc. And yes, I am making a good case for mature software with those lovely examples. But clearly they wanted more widgets and they kept engineers who can deliver those widgets. This wasn't some unsustainable thing for Youtube as the top comment argues. And that's how most software businesses work as of now. If you remain complacent, you're slowly dying to competition. Because the demand for more still exists.

array_key_first 9mo ago

The number of customers is, effectively, infinite though. YouTube continues to be engineered and continues to grow. It could have, realistically, been finished over a decade ago. But they repeated branch out into new markets with new features, and that seems to work from them.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
The new features are an order of magnitude less complexity to build than the main feature - hosting video at scale, which is complete and just requires maintenance.
- paganel 9mo ago
  > hosting video at scale, I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part. Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.
    - slhck 9mo ago
      That is really a bit of an oversimplification IMO. Please check, for example, the Netflix tech blog and read about what has changed in the past 10 years or so when it comes to architecting video processing and video delivery systems. There's a tremendous amount of engineering work there which advances the entire industry. For instance, it's not trivial to add live events to a VoD infrastructure at that scale — it's not like you just add a few more nodes and buy faster encoders.

swat535 9mo ago

> Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth. I suppose you could build a simple, small app and leave it on "maintenance" (even then, it's going to be difficult due to crumbling infra) but real world products don't work that way. Companies want to scale, add features and expand to various verticals. They also have to compete with other companies , there is regulations, compliance and never ending list of incoming features from sales, marketing and customers. Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. Unless you are able to curb the corporate greed, you will need to grow your engineering team.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
> The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth. There's only so much growth you can achieve in any vertical - the key is to realize when you've hit that limit and cut your losses. Unfortunately as a company employee you have no incentive to do that. I doubt Vimeo would've sold if there was still lots of growth potential on the table. They've exhausted it, and for various factors were unable to cut costs internally. Bending Spoons evaluated the situation and determined they can still extract a certain amount of profit by massively cutting costs - they gave chunk of said expected profit to the current owners, and are now implementing said strategy. > Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. The decline of Twitter has all to do with Musk's politics and lack of any kind of strategy of the product (makes sense if you see it as his personal mouthpiece rather than a business). Tech-wise it seems to be working well enough. Cutting 80% of expensive engineering staff for a 1% drop in uptime of a non-critical service with no SLAs is a no-brainer.
lotsofpulp 9mo ago
> Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended. This seemed to end pretty well. He overpaid for it, but the website kept functioning without issues.

AbstractH24 9mo ago

> Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. The search engine markets is finite, so Alphabet expanded elsewhere

ben_w 9mo ago
> Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users. Doch, even then. Back at university, we had practice sessions about our CVs and job interviews. Mine had a cliché in it, "committed to quality"*. The businessperson who was helping us figure out how to be any good at the jobs market, picked up on it with an example: Which is higher quality? A Porsche, or a go-kart? We nodded at "Porsche", as was the point. Except no; you didn't consider who the customer was. If this is for a kid who just wants to have some fun, they can't afford a Porsche, they've got no insurance, they don't know how to drive. A go-kart solves their problem, they get to have fun, a Porsche doesn't. (I'm paraphrasing, it was over 20 years ago now). * I was 19 or 20 when I wrote that, it was about as true as when ChatGPT writes the same: I didn't know any better.
- joncrane 9mo ago
  This is a weird example because there are crappy go-karts and there are carefully designed and assembled go-karts. You can have a high quality anything: car, truck, go-kart, trailer, wagon.
  - tracker1 9mo ago
    Even then... you reach a point where any additional quality or craftsmanship offers no more value. Aesthetics can have some arbitrary value, but even then it's a matter of taste.