This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of all inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.
At my last startup, the total monthly subscription cost was the $1 Bitwarden tier (granted, we were tiny). And yes, a Ryzen system bolted to a $10 lackrack was entirely sufficient for our hosting needs.
(They took so long to figure out the revenue model that they almost had the money taken back by the VCs, and had a CEO thrust upon them)
But in the case of Eastern Europe, where neoliberal ideology gripped most of the newly independent states, this is one of the few examples, but quite a good one, of where that ideology did in fact work out exactly as intended, for good.
I wish. There was a great liberal leap forward in the 90s, but now it's state-run economy all over again.
I'm talking about the 1990s and early 00s.
* I wound't agree with them all, even the successful ones...but as none of them are my country it's not really any of my business except to learn via observation.
Quite the opposite - the GDP rose dramatically, the standard of living too.
> I'm talking about the 1990s and early 00s.
That's the problem: these policies have a delayed effect. They were inacted in early 90s, and the country reaped all their benefits in mid 00s, while they were already scaled back and revamped. And for the last 5-10 years of stagnation have been the direct result of the latter.
In terms of developing software - it’s the same there as hardware - noone wants to deal with their own databases or servers anymore, so it’s all cloud/aws, and now they don’t want to deal with OS anymore, so it’s all dynamo/cloud functions/lambdas etc. Try developing software for all this offline, without being wired into a giant cloud company infra.
We also use at least 10 paid general-purpose tools that each fill a real need (we don't keep tools we don't use):
- Notion for knowledge management
- Airtable to manage operations data (not customer data)
- Hubspot for Sales and Marketing
- Lattice for HR
- Spendesk for expenses management
- Quickbooks for accounting
- Typeform for various customer feedback
- Zoom for remote work and link between our offices
- GSuite for everything in it
- Figma for UI design
- Recruitee for recruitment management
And finally, add also at least 10 paid Engineering-specific tools:
- Gitlab of course
- AWS for hosting of course
- Cloudflare for DNS stuff
- Sentry for error reporting
- Crowdin for internationalization
- FullStory for UX studies
- Apollo engine to get decent analytics about our backend
- Webflow for our Website (Not for the webapp of course)
- Pagerduty for operations
- We used Cloudcraft at some point to have an idea how our AWS stack look like
I could go on... But in the end, you end up with ~10 Saas tools peer seat, with costs from $2 to $100 per tool. And it is valuable, we pay them because they are worth it. But yes this is an interesting trend...
You might like this issue they just merged up https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/37081
Roadmaps and single-level epics coming to Silver.
But in reality you kind of do - chairs are still a depreciating asset that require upkeep and maintenance. I recall at my last medium-sized company (500ish people) that every quarter they had guys come in to fix the broken chairs. I don't think the chairs were bad quality, it's just that in a company that size where the chairs got a ton of use that every quarter you'd have 10-20 chairs that needed fixing.
Startups tend to have a desire to keep capital costs as low as possible because the need to be nimble and respond quickly and deploy capital efficiently is much more important than the meager savings you'd get from buying vs. subscribing. You rarely if ever see startups buying their office space vs. renting for similar reasons.
If I had to guess, it's people gaming the chair replacement system. This might seem surprising but its really not, employees love to do this if at all possible at any company.
My friend was just gloating to me how he finessed an $1600 standing desk and got the company to pay for it. $1600 to do what a stack of books does under your keyboard. They ordered that ridiculous desk the day he emailed the office manager about it without question, because standing desks are so hot right now in the office paraphernalia world.