> Staffing is the “single biggest cost” after fees paid to app distribution platforms like Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to Arison. This is a hilarious quote. It's a software company! What other major costs are there besides the staff to make and manage the software? I think I even find it a little disturbing that fees paid to Apple and Google are higher than salary paid to staff.
> What other major costs are there besides the staff to make and manage the software? Server costs don't seem to be mentioned anywhere here?
Unless a company is doing a computationally expensive thing (like deep learning, or big data crunching etc) or the domain is commoditized/low value then the opex should be an inconsequential amount, and only at massive scale does it become worth optimizing (relative to the cost of engineer's time to do that optimization).
Optimizing for runtime speed can be a product advantage though, but in my experiences are usually unimportant so long as it's not absurdly inefficient.