• falsem@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    44
    arrow-down
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yes, if you exclude the research and development costs then most websites have high margins. Keeping it running is the cheap part.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      27
      arrow-down
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      … what kind of research and development do you think went into this, when did this take place, and how much do you suppose it cost?

      Follow-up question: Do you actually know anything about software development?

      • falsem@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        How much R&D went into creating the Google Play store? Probably 100s of millions of dollars so far over the course of about 15 years. Do you not know what R&D is or something? In the US tax code, software development is considered R&D.

        And yes, I am a software developer.

        • gnutrino@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Probably 100s of millions of dollars so far over the course of about 15 years.

          OK but the claim is that they made ~$12billion in profit in 2021 alone so that actually wouldn’t affect the margin that much if true…

          • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            10
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            It’s way more than hundreds of millions.

            The actual store doesn’t take that much development, but Android does.

            • falsem@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yeah, hundreds is probably a low guess but I’m also excluding Android itself. There Play Store itself has a ton of features most of its end users aren’t aware of that are important to it’s overall operation and development ecosystem. Off the top of my head it does things like code signing and authentication, security scans, governance and enforcement of rules, payment processing, etc.

              • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Sure, and I have no numbers. My point is that splitting out the store is inherently bad accounting, because it’s all of their development of Android that the play store funds.

            • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              And… licensing Android/Google Play services pays for that development, not the store revenue.

              • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

                This is full on basket case delusional.

                There is no possibility Google would even consider supporting Android without the play store. It’s the entire reason it exists.

                • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Wtf are you talking about? What I said, is that the licensing fees google charges for use of their products already covers the costs of development they put into android. They don’t use Google play store revenues to cover costs, because those costs are already covered before anyone makes a purchase from the Google Play store,

          • falsem@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            11
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            That is a lot, however my point is just that margin is a pretty worthless statistic for software since it has such high upfront costs.

      • Artyom@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Research question: where are my customers at all times and what are they doing at all times?

        Development goal: Design a system to know where all must customers are at all times and what they are doing.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Gatekeeping is important for these kinds of discussions. If I tried to speak authoritatively on chemistry, for example, it would matter if I understood the content being discussed.

          In this case, the individual believes hundreds of millions of dollars has been put into researching and developing the Google Play store… I take issue with that, having built similar for internal systems at a fraction of that cost.

          • papertowels@lemmy.one
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Right. Typically you’d sus out whether or not they’re qualified to speak about these things by listening to what they have to say instead of immediately implying they don’t know what they’re talking about asking them to confirm their qualifications, but maybe you just handle social dynamics differently.

            Curious, since you’re comparing what you created to the play store, how many staff did you have working on your version, and how many years have you maintained it for?

              • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Like the individual you’re replying to, nothing you’re talking about falls into “research and development.”

                • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  So you just don’t know what you’re talking about then.

                  Scaling up is by far the cause of the vast majority of the cost of developing truly massive systems, and the number of users you’re building for is unconditionally impossible to exclude from the math on anything that touches a server.

            • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Neither of those expenses fall into “research and development,” so would have no bearing on the discussion at hand.

              • papertowels@lemmy.one
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                So just to get this straight, you are arguing semantics, because you are excluding software development from research and development. I have no strong feelings about that, because I work exclusively in an r&d shop so everything I do is r&d, so I’ve lost sight of where the line is drawn. Seems silly though.

                Additionally, you are citing your personal experience developing what you claim to be a similar system yet you haven’t shared details that can be used by others to confirm your experience is comparable to that of setting up and running the Google play store.

                Is that right?

                See the latter part is what suggests to everyone else that you’re not qualified to be contributing to this conversation. Share your experiences to convince folks you know what you’re talking about.

                Or, I guess we can do things your way.

                “Do you actually know anything about software engineering?”

                See how much more productive one way is than the other?

                • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Ongoing maintenance is literally part of system upkeep. You don’t include that in R&D costs. That’s akin to including power as a R&D cost.

                  Total staff involved in development? IIRC that wasn’t your original question, I believe you said something like “total users” or “total staff” in a way that could very easily be read as “how many people are involved today” which is a very different question.

                  Software development would obviously be included in the R&D cost, while total staff running the system after development would absolutely not be.

                  Why didn’t I provide information on the project? Because it would be so generalized due to NDA that it wouldn’t be useful. Here, let’s give it a go: The project in question was for a corporation with around half a million users. Serving internal applications to a large number of device types, though admittedly piggybacking on some external infrastructure since OS’s like iOS explicitly disallow self signing applications.

                  Admittedly, this pales in comparison to the PlayStore which is installed on billions of devices, though you won’t find many who have worked on something scaled that massive.

                  Did that explanation help? No of course not, because it provided so little information that it’s all but useless. It also doesn’t actually show that I know what I’m talking about. How was I involved? Was I a useful worker? How long was I part of the project?

                  Your question is just a long winded way of asking what I already did.

  • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    Fucking doy right? Their middleman products are licensed ideas, not a huge overhead.

    70 percent seems low