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The Cost of Developers

stratechery.com

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Re: The Cost of Developers

#151

Post by pm90 »

myWindoonn wrote: post #127
jasode wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>VCs and their money are the bad guys, because the dynamics of their [the VCs] investment You're repeating the same "outsourcing of blame" to VCs that I was trying to short circuit. VCs as an abstraction are a convenient target but that doesn't mean they are the correct target. The founders of Github such as Chris Wanstrath, Tom Preston-Werner, et al have agency and autonomy . Why are they specifically not included i…

You're super-close. Money is the "bad guy". It might not appear to have agency or autonomy, but that is because humans are not good at perceiving intangible power structures. In other words, why aren't we saying this: >Money is the bad guy, because its presence, uneven distribution, cult of worshipers, fungibility, and inherent ties to social power structures are unhealthy influences on the founders of Github

I feel like I should post Francisco D'Anconia's Money speech here....

Money by itself isn't the "bad guy"; its a store of value. Like Technology it can be used for good or bad. We have structured our society to reward greed with unbelievable wealth. Like how can someone spend billions of dollars of their wealth? What is the need for someone to own all that wealth? And yet we all take that as given and aspire to it.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#152

Post by 2RTZZSro »

singingfish wrote: post #63
coldcode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At where I work we use Github Enterprise, which costs way more than Gitlab Enterprise, is not scalable, and barely cares about enterprise customers like ourselves. Gitlab on the other hand is much cheaper, is highly scalable, runs in AWS, and is responsive to requests. Ultimately to make it as a business you need to provide what the customer wants and is willing to pay. Github never did.

There are quite a few things about gitlab that smell of amateur hour with the way it's put together, but on the whole it's a really good product and I like that enough to make it usable is free open source, and the CI stuff is much nicer than any other I have used (although the way we've put it together, we've hit its limitations a bit).

You accuse Gitlab of "quite a few [problematic] things" but do not put forward even a single one of those.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#153

Post by pm90 »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #137
coldcode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At where I work we use Github Enterprise, which costs way more than Gitlab Enterprise, is not scalable, and barely cares about enterprise customers like ourselves. Gitlab on the other hand is much cheaper, is highly scalable, runs in AWS, and is responsive to requests. Ultimately to make it as a business you need to provide what the customer wants and is willing to pay. Github never did.

We switched from GitHub Enterprise to BitBucket Server several years ago and are pretty (80%) happy with the decision. Saved an absolute truck load of money. The only issue with BitBucket Server is that it (inexplicably) does not have a commit compare view. https://jira.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/BSER... This is such a massive oversight I have to conclude Atlassian themselves don’t use this product. I…

> If MS changes the cost structure of GH Enterprise we’d probably switch back (haven’t looked into how well it integrates with Jira etc recently).

Given that they acquired GH mostly for the Open Source parts, I wouldn't bet on that :/. Enterprise was Github's way of making money and that incentive is kinda reduced, if not eliminated entirely.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#154

Post by zaat »

scarface74 wrote: post #113
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the place of myth and legend: outside of SV. I know, it's crazy.

Name some companies making any substantial money selling Windows desktop apps besides Microsoft and Adobe? Again games don't count, they aren't for the most part developing "Windows apps" they are developing apps on top of game engines.

SAP

Re: The Cost of Developers

#155

Post by lev99 »

heydenberk wrote: post #22

> the App Store dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for developers Is there any platform with higher barriers to entry than the App Store? iOS development requires a proprietary toolchain only available on Apple hardware, programming languages hardly used elsewhere, not to mention the $99/year developer fee and the litany of vague and arbitrarily enforced rules and content guidelines for App Store release.

Video game consoles require approval before they will even send the SDKs.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#156

Post by lev99 »

zaat wrote: post #19
rsp1984 wrote: post #13

There are times when I really like the thoughtful analysis on Stratechery and there are other times when I think it's a complete pile of detached-from-reality horsesh!t. Today is of the 2nd kind. What it also has is a potentially fatal weakness: no platform with user-based leverage. Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. This, by the way…

> Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. At first I thought the same way, but then I started wondering if those users are really meaningful users. Isn't most of the new developer products are either mobile apps or SaaS solutions, leaving aside monsters like adobe? If so, does it really matters that so many users are using windows if they…

> If so, does it really matters that so many users are using windows if they consume apps mainly with their (probably, chrome) browser?

Windows is monetizing Telemetry data, which does have meaning and value, even for people that never leave chrome.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#157

Post by gm-conspiracy »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #137
coldcode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At where I work we use Github Enterprise, which costs way more than Gitlab Enterprise, is not scalable, and barely cares about enterprise customers like ourselves. Gitlab on the other hand is much cheaper, is highly scalable, runs in AWS, and is responsive to requests. Ultimately to make it as a business you need to provide what the customer wants and is willing to pay. Github never did.

We switched from GitHub Enterprise to BitBucket Server several years ago and are pretty (80%) happy with the decision. Saved an absolute truck load of money. The only issue with BitBucket Server is that it (inexplicably) does not have a commit compare view. https://jira.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/BSER... This is such a massive oversight I have to conclude Atlassian themselves don’t use this product. I…

Also, their Sourcetree offering for Windows is quite nice, but the OS X version has big problem with git-flow.

You can tell it is two very different teams working on it.

Atlassian is now like the Cisco of late 90s an early 2000s, an amalgamation of disparate companies' technologies under the umbrella brand.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#158

Post by hinkley »

jasode wrote: post #32
heydenberk wrote: post #22

> the App Store dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for developers Is there any platform with higher barriers to entry than the App Store? iOS development requires a proprietary toolchain only available on Apple hardware, programming languages hardly used elsewhere, not to mention the $99/year developer fee and the litany of vague and arbitrarily enforced rules and content guidelines for App Store release.

stratechery wrote: "the App Store dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for developers" To which you replied: "Is there any platform with higher barriers to entry than the App Store? [...] , not to mention the $99/year developer fee" His baseline for "lowered barriers" was retail channel distribution .[1] Think of shrinkwrapped packaged software like Quicken on the shelves of CompUSA, OfficeDepot, Costco, and bo…

The telcos were taking 70% of the gross before the Apple store came along. A big reason people flocked to iOS was the hope of finally turning a profit, because Apple more than doubled the developer’s take. That was a huge barrier.

What % is Apple taking now? I know they lowered it a bit but I don’t recall what the new numbers ended up at.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#159

Post by isostatic »

Mary-Jane wrote: post #110
throwawayqdhd wrote: post #104

Solid analysis as always. As a Windows user, I'm finding it increasingly harder to justify using the OS. Pretty much every single software I use to get my work done works in my browser. The only software that runs natively is Ableton, which works perhaps even better on Mac. If I haven't switched, it's simply because of laziness: it would be too much of a hassle to copy all my samples to another device and reinstall a…

The bigger challenge, if you're a long time Windows user, will be overcoming your own muscle memory. Apple's keyboard layout and shortcuts are similar but different enough to cause problems. It can be quite distracting for instance if you're in the zone and hit the shortcut to replace some text, and then suddenly every window on your desktop disappears!

Biggest problem I have with a mac is the " mark. On a PC (GB keyboard) it's shift-2, on a mac shift-2 is @, and " is shift-'

Re: The Cost of Developers

#160

Post by scarface74 »

zaat wrote: post #154
scarface74 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name some companies making any substantial money selling Windows desktop apps besides Microsoft and Adobe? Again games don't count, they aren't for the most part developing "Windows apps" they are developing apps on top of game engines.

SAP

SAP isn't "windows desktop software". This whole thread started by saying that Microsoft can leverage its Windows dominance.

SAP can either be used as web based software and even thier "Windows" Software is mostly built using thier proprietary cross platform ABAP platform.

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