[nickff]

Software has also benefitted from a massive tax subsidy relative to hardware, as the latter requires a massive capital investment. Hardware requires expensive real estate, and benefits from saving the spending, whereas software can exist on debt and small footprints.

[__MatrixMan__]

That may have been the case prior to section 174, when you could invest massively in something, write it off as a loss, and then pivot to reusing it profitably, but now I think that all R&D efforts are equally discouraged.

[nickff]

You're right that the delta has been reduced, but producing physical goods still requires much more capital outlay (which is still disadvantaged).