But Who's Going To Mow That Lawn?

Until our beloved government completely borked our economy and interest rates skyrocketed, I was on the hunt for a potential new home. It's fun to look at houses on property websites and see the swimming pools and the landscaped gardens and the 5 ensuite bathrooms and so on. But even if I could afford the Big House In The Country, the practical side of my brain kicks in and asks "Yeah, but who's going to mow that lawn?"

They say life is 90% maintenance, and the cost of a house doesn't stop at the asking price. Friends I know who have the Big House In The Country have sacrificed a big chunk of their lives and their income in order to live in it. And the irony is that they have to work harder for longer for those increasingly rare moments when they can actually enjoy it.

Software is like houses in that respect. The bigger and fancier it is, the more it's going to cost you - not just to create, but to own. A country estate without a lot of staff will just crumble. Which is why so many of our landed gentry sold theirs to super-wealthy oligarchs and hotel chains. They just couldn't afford the upkeep.

I've seen businesses in a similar situation: simply not bringing in enough coin to keep the lights on because they created a behemoth of a solution. If I were buying a house, I'd have a little spreadsheet somewhere to estimate not just the mortgage repayments, but also the running costs. How much will it cost to heat in winter? How much work will it take to maintain the garden? And a country view might seem appealing, but I know from experience that daily car use is what tends to come with that, costing thousands every year.

Industry estimates put the cost of software over its lifetime at 7-10x what it costs to deliver initially. It's a blunt instrument, but it sort of gets you in the ballpark. If the team say "This feature's going to take 3 days", then it's likely to cost you another 20-30 days to maintain its value over its lifetime. (The average operational life of a software product or system is 8 years, so about 3-4 days a year).

The software equivalent of the 400-acre country estate is products like Microsoft Windows. Huge, sprawling, and requiring armies of staff to keep it running at eye-watering expense. If you end up owning something as big as Windows, you're going to need oligarch-level income to pay for its upkeep. Most businesses aren't in that league, or anywhere near it. A product like Windows would crush them, just like a Big House In The Country would crush me.