[edw]

It's not necessarily about money. An engineer can burn through tens of thousands of dollars per month in cloud spend because they have access to the AWS [or] GCP console, but that same engineer may not have the first idea about how to get the CFO's sign-off to purchase a license that will facilitate a halving of that spend. And that same CFO can institute a policy against using credit cards for recurring payments that prevent that engineer from expensing the purchase through a corporate card. And the software company may not offer a bill-via-invoice option — or they may only offer it for amounts greater than the amount the engineer wants to spend.

So much of what happens in sufficiently large organizations has nothing to do with profit maximization. Think confederacy of dunces, not a conspiracy of greedy evil geniuses.