Comment by jameshart

Exactly. We would love software development to be as simple as: you pay $1m to engineers to develop a software machine; you now have a $1m software machine that you can pay nonengineers to operate and crank out revenue.

In practice software machines need constant tending and operation by engineers in order to keep them pumping out money.

In the context of live software systems, a lot of software engineering - even engineering that involves innovation and creative research and problem solving - is done in service of making the machine continue to operate; it is operational expense.

It’s like: Buying some filing cabinets is clearly a capital expenditure. But paying an office administrator to come up with and keep modifying the filing system you use in those filing cabinets to make sure it continues to serve your business is not capital investment, it’s business operational costs.