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Today I was reading littlejohn's blog and found this really interesting post:
Why is Software Progressing so Slowly Now?
It is a great read, and I urge you to go and read it if you have ten minutes available. The most interesting quote is this:
If you'll pardon the really bad pun on a really bad subject: lots of software has stagnated because its developers and publishers no longer poured money into developing their software, but into seizing the means of computation. Competition is expensive and hard. User lock-in is cheap and really easy.
I have been musing about this for a long time, but I don't think I had encountered exactly this argument before. It was always explained as "software just expands to use all available hardware", or as "Andy and Bill's law", or as "software developers are just lazy", or as "software developers are expensive, and hardware is cheap" so just use whatever computing power you need to have your product out.
Wikipedia: Andy and Bill's law
But this perspective is new: the big push to the "cloud", microservices and SaaS subscriptions is just another manifestation of plain, old corporate greed and user lock-in.
What are your thoughts?
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