I hate stories like this. Yeah, excellent documentation for an immensely expensive one-off, bespoke, incredibly complex product costs a ton of money. Duh.
However, I don't think this is the case, the cost probably has to do more with the specificity and overall data included.
Yeah, not your point, but it was a great line in a great movie.
On the subject of why it's billed differently: well, first, transparency. What would you make you feel better? Getting a $4 billion lump quote for a giant project, or seeing that $4 billion itemized down so you can check the underlying data?
Edit: Oops, sorry, data entry failure. Thanks for the corrections. Fixed.
You're off by an order of magnitude. It works out to $840/page.
Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.
Regardless, the cost nevet reflects the effort put into it. It is simply what they charge because they can and because the buyer pays and because the competition is not offering something better when bidding.
One of the reasons I left aerospace is I found out that when a project ends, you and 2,000 of your closest friends all hit the street at the same time. :-)
Or as another friend put it when we were discussing the big companies: "If you work for Boeing, you'll always have a job. But you may have to move to Florida to keep it." And current events show the first part isn't even true any more...
That's a ceiling but not a floor. Things never cost less than the expense of producing them. 840 per page or so does not sound excessive for this sort of thing--I'm surprise it's not 10x more.
(Yeah, loss leaders occasionally, but don't look for that in military contracts.)
It's more like, we're going to bury this in a cavern, and when we dig it up in 100 years, it absolutely, positively has to work.
On a document this big, you need to properly organize and index it so that the maintenance personnel would be able to find the relevant bits easily. that's a lot of editing job required, and a lot of coordination (to properly reference and label each subsystem for example).
Also, this document requires a lot of reviews and a lot of the maintenance procedures needs to actually be performed to actually check if they are clear enough to be executed reliably by operators/maintenance personnel.
All that is a lot of work, requiring a significant amount of man hours by skilled people and hardware and tooling available for validation.
Oracle sells products/services that thousands or millions of organizations purchase. That's a completely different kind of business arrangement than something that a single entity purchases once. If you hire a software consultant to build you a custom system, they're definitely going to charge you for the time they spend writing documentation.