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Comment by throw1234875 | Hacker News Reader

> The Chocolate Factory filed a briefing [PDF] objecting to Epic's demands on Monday, arguing that its internal estimate of up to $137 million to implement catalog access, library porting and distribution of third-party app stores, plus ongoing charges to keep the whole thing running, was simply too much to bear.

They could staff a hefty-sized team, have that team ship their deliverables wrapped in SAP middleware deployed on Oracle with metal racked by NASA astronauts on the dark side of the *fucking moon* and I still don't understand how it costs 137 million to CRUD a few models and wrap a REST API around it.

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Xerox PARC operated on a budget of $12m/year in today's money. Out of that we got the laser printer, Ethernet, the GUI, much of the innovation behind object-oriented programming, etc. Just one of those innovations (laser printer) paid for the entire lab's operations 200 times over.

Today's startups need twice that to ship a fucking terminal emulator: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/warp-raises-23m-to-build-a...

> Today's startups need twice that

The laser printer was invented in the 70s. Back then, property prices (both rental and purchase) were much much MUCH more reasonable for both companies and their employees, with the latter being a significant contributor to the explosion in wages.

Or to rephrase, you needed way less money for any given thing 50 years ago because the associated costs were much lower.

The associated costs being higher is inflation, which he adjusted for, and there's lots of working from home nowadays, which means you need even less property per person than back then.

Gotta pay the k8s bills somehow

Back then all that stuff was basically low-hanging fruit. The time was right. If Xerox hadn't come up with them, someone else would have within a couple of years.

Also, they were all conceptually pretty simple.

Believe it or not, running an app store is massively more complex than any of those things you listed. Dealing with payments across countries, legal entities, fraud, security, hiring processes, employee performance standards, and so forth. A laser printer or a GUI is much simpler in comparison.

Also, that terminal emulator you're describing -- first, it's not just an emulator, it's adding a lot of new features. Second, developer salaries have skyrocketed relative to inflation. So even accounting for inflation, $12M goes a lot less far than it did in the 1970's.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Median salaries in 2023 were $130k. Yes, salaries are higher now but not by an insane amount, but this is a software team. They don't need an office, they don't need custom hardware. They don't need to invent ethernet along the way to make this work. They need to make a terminal emulator that people are willing to spend money on (good luck). Push the salaries up to $200k/year and total cost to $300k to cover other expenses (HR, health insurance, buying their laptops, etc.) and $23 million supports a team of about 77 devs for a year or about 25 for 3 years.

What is "the chocolate factory"? Why is it mentioned only once, but randomly in other articles? Is this a moniker for google?

its a nickname

https://www.matt-blake.co.uk/google-inside-the-chocolate-fac...

[ Free food is not the only perk to working at Google; the offices themselves have more than a touch of the Willy Wonkas (employees even refer to it occasionally as ‘the chocolate factory’). There’s a library with beanbags; sofa-lined workspaces; a state-of-the-art gym; a massage parlour offering treatments from facial-rejuvenation to Reiki; and a roof-top allotment area where Googlers grow their own vegetables. There’s a ball pool on the sixth floor, between marketing and events, and a ‘napping pod’ for when the fun gets too much. One of the canteens has a pool table, a fussball table, a table-tennis table and a candyfloss machine. We feel as though we’ve stumbled into a sort of open-plan Shangri-La. No wonder everyone we pass seems so chuffed with themselves. ]

That’s what this particular website has been calling Google, because it’s “quirky”.

"The Chocolate Factory" is a term they use for Google in The Register.

Yes, it is Google.

The Register puts out high-quality articles but maintains its very sarcastic tone which found its fit in a much earlier internet era (Founded in 1994!). It strove to be the IT-workers own news outlet, in stark contrast to IT-capitalist trade magazines/WSJ/etc.

“The Chocolate Factory” is its sarcastic moniker for Google, and 10-15 years ago it fit quite well - satirical but descriptive. The moniker almost made fun of TheReg’s own readers as much as Google itself. Now the same name almost drips with venom in context of how much less cool Google is than it once was.

Also “$137 million” sounds like pocket change for Google.

Inflation and falsehoods about costs seems like rampant corruption, honestly, especially in court filings like this.

The amount of six figure websites I've seen launched as business with very few staff and the site looking like nothing more than a basic django app has always been puzzling to me.

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