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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

You are ignoring the cost of maintaining software. That is huge. "Working" is a relative term.

Please explain.

I have sites that run for years without me editing a single line of code or any other sort of maintainance. Backups run automatically, so do regular clean-ups of the database and certain directories.

What sort of maintainance would you say a largely client-side application like iGoogle does require?

Edit: anybody care to explain the random downvoting?

Are your sites written in C++ and being attacked by China and Russia? Do they have plug-ins for several hundred apps, many of which work with ever changing external websites? Do your sites integrate with critical email and advertising accounts? I would not be surprised to learn they were burning $1M a year on iGoogle.

Re. random downvoting, it happens on tablets. Chill, somebody else will be along shortly to vote the comment up out of the gray.

Attacks: I would guess that is dealt with on a netwok level for all of Google, not individually per app.

Plugins: Just drop the external sources that change their APIs.

Accounts: Accounts are managed by Google Accounts, not by individual apps.

iGoogle is mainly a client-side script that displays small amounts of data. Still think there is not much "maintaining" to do.

It is client side in the www.google.com domain. Meaning it can potentially attack other services in that domain like, oh, most other Google services. You'd want more than just a lone intern watching over it in his spare time.

I'm not ignoring it at all. I'm just calling bullshit on the idea that the cost is anywhere near "huge".

1 developer, 75% time. That's it. If they are north of 2 developers they are doing something very wrong.

Even granting your premise, who wants to be the ONE developer stuck working on some project that clearly has no future?

Indeed, 1 google developer is going to be north of $100K/year, and if you're going to trust them to run a project, even a zombie one, probably significantly higher. Even worse is the loss of their expert advice and productivity on projects that actually deserve it.

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