As such, the subscription pays for way more than simple upkeep. It pays for a large development team to continue to add features to an app that is essentially already done.
But what does all that new code do?? I'd challenge anyone who's not a developer to name a single new feature added to chrome in the last year. I'm a web developer and I struggle to name more than 5 changes.
Its easy to pick on chrome because the numbers are mostly-public. But the same is probably true of facebook.com, ms office and all sorts of other big company products. As features compound, the marginal value of each additional line of code added becomes vanishingly small. (All the really useful features have already been added, and project iteration gets much slower in big projects).
There are thousands of engineers working on facebook.com. If they all quietly left and were never replaced, how long do you think it would take before anyone in the public would notice? 6 months? 1 year? Longer?
And if thats the case, what a waste of that huge pool of talent. If you could leave your job without any of your users noticing or caring, what a waste of your education and your potential. Quit and start that company you've always been dreaming about starting. Go do literally anything of substance.
[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/contributors/summary [2] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...
For example, a small feature or redesign that increases engagement of a feature by 10% can make millions for Facebook.
The web platform has been growing (progressive web apps, more features in JavaScript include WebAssembly), and yes I'm sure there are some new features in Chrome. Does that include the mobile app codebases? Chrome for mobile has been adding features.
1000 people is a lot of money, so Google clearly sees value in what they're doing.
They've definitely been busy, somehow. And they've definitely added a few marginal features here and there in the last year (position:sticky, grids, css modules, headless snapshot rendering all come to mind for me). But 1.5 million code reviewed lines of programmer effort seems disproportionally expensive for what they've done.
How many startups could you start given 1000 google engineer-years of effort? 100? Don't get me wrong, I like webassembly. But the output of 100 new startups with world class engineering teams and 1 year of runway sounds much more interesting by every metric that I can think of.
How many more "uber for cats" startups do we need? (That's purposefully not a fair characterization… A lot of startups are doing less interesting/useful work than improving the platform.)
A team of 10 people can creatively put together some really cool stuff. But you know what? Not all problems can be solved by a team of 10 people. And what happens for the ones that manage to bring in either revenue or more VC? They start hiring. And then you can complain about "why does company X need 1,000 people to do what they do?"
I do get what you're saying, but I'm pretty sure the list of things those 1,000 developers produced and those 1.5 million lines of code represented would be substantial if you dug in. A great deal of it might not have any appeal to you, but undoubtedly has appeal to someone.
And of course, there are countless bug fixes and other small improvements, and all of this has to work on six operating systems.
"I saw the best minds of my generation consumed putting advertising next to pictures of cats"
If moonshots weren't such a high priority, and instead startups focused on building a successful business, perhaps there wouldn't be so many dead startups. Doing a few tens of million a year in revenue isn't a terrible place to be after a few years!
To be fair, their R&D doesn't exclusively pay for an improved 140 character text box. It also goes towards staying attractive for advertisers and trying new ideas.
But still, the gap between the rather modest progress that Twitter is making on any front and their enormous costs (not just on R&D) is striking.
Now the incentive is to keep the customer happy so they continue to subscribe. This could mean more bug fixes and less dubious features.
Or you just keep the customer hostage using proprietary data formats and/or silos? Of course, this does not apply to every application (eg. Markdown editors), but it is a tried an tested strategy. And before you needed to incentivize paid upgrades, but with a subscription, it's 'keep paying or lose access to your data'.
And what if the company goes under? Previously, you could just keep running the software (heck, some companies are still running old VMS, DOS, and OS/2 software). Now, it's over once the license server that checks that you paid your subscription is down. Of course, some non-subscription software requires activation as well, but a lot of ISVs just use registration codes.
That's been a problem since before subscriptions became mainstream, even software with a perpetual license has often required activation.
That's not insignificant. Look how many iOS apps will be abandoned when iOS 11 forces 64-bit compatibility.