[mattbrewsbytes]

At big companies you may have something like a cash cow and it is on maintenance only type of efforts. No major product enhancements being done but more internal work and maintenance like database indexes, disk space, server upgrades, etc. There might be other teams building new products/features based on your systems and data so there are internal integrations needed. Then whenever some CIO comes along that was sold a bill of goods on an ERP system you have to go thru those transitions.

At a SaaS company now and it feels like product development is where the majority of the focus is, to the detriment of maintenance. For example being a few versions behind the latest security patch level while someone is making promises at a conference on things that aren't even built yet.

In my experience, the longer an application has been running and in service, the less time developers are spending writing fresh new code or even prototyping, etc. I think this is where that "itch" comes in for developers to invent new things. I totally understand that, its fun to build a new application.

[krishadi]

I could imagine that the cash cow part of a product gets all the attention in the beginning. Does that stay the same through the life cycle? Or do you see that it takes a back seat while feature development on top of that takes the center stage at alter stages of the product?

[edited to add this] I also see that it's sometimes easier to build something new, than to go on maintaining something.