I don’t think you can dismiss the maintenance required on buildings and bridges so easily. Bridges must be continuously repainted to avoid corrosion, for exampl

I don’t think you can dismiss the maintenance required on buildings and bridges so easily. Bridges must be continuously repainted to avoid corrosion, for example. Nature will overtake buildings, bridges, and anything we make. Concrete cracks and plants grow through it. Our entire infrastructure is a never ending battle to control nature’s relentless push to expand. Software, on the other hand, is durable. I can download and run software that was written 40 years ago and it still works exactly the same, with 0 maintenance. Leave a bridge or building alone for 40 years and see what happens. With software, the battle isn’t against nature, it’s against humans with bad intent. Once something is no longer popular, it tends to not be much of a target anymore. The constant updates are in part for security, as it’s a cat and mouse game. The updates are also to keep this feeling fresh and relevant, so people don’t move on to something new that seems to be getting better support… much like painting the bridge and changing the landscaping outside a building. This shows the people using it that it is cared for and keeps it feeling useful. I maintained a simple website at work for 15 years. Had I not made little tweaks over time, people would have filled the gaps with other tools and it would have fallen into irrelevance. Because I made these little updates to keep it relevant, people kept using it and didn’t seek out other solutions to fill the gaps. Some may see some of this as busy work, but it only truly becomes busy work if the system is perfect and they keep working on it to the point of making it worse, just to have something to do.