[Ologn]

From spring 2019 to July of this year, I worked at IT at a Fortune 100 retailer.

The project I worked on was enormously successful in terms of revenue growth. I, and people on my team had a huge nationwide impact, which started when we were about a dozen people (it has grown now to several dozen).

Whereas even a manager of one of the big box stores would only have a limited geographical impact. Whereas my work would always have nation-wide impact (and at some companies programmers would have world-wide impact). I turned on a payment option for my platform one quarter, and very quickly people were using it for one million a month in purchases. Which kept going up.

The book Capitalism without Capital talks about this. Some aspects of it are alluded to in Fred Brooks 1975 book The Mythical Man Month.

To build a car, a lot of effort has to be made in making the car - not just the end result, but the making the glass, tires and so forth. Whereas with programming, I write an app, or a feature for an app, and the end result is duplicated and distributed around the country (or even around the world) for free, or virtually free. I'm not helping make commodities one at a time like someone on an automobile line is. It is something different.

[dexterdog]

> I turned on a payment option for my platform one quarter, and very quickly people were using it for one million a month in purchases.

How is that making a difference? These are sales that were already happening and you allowed them to do something like "pay with paypal" and then claim the entire sale?

[SoftTalker]

Making impulse purchases easier can capture sales that would never have happened otherwise.

That's why Amazon developed (and unbelievably were able to patent) "one-click ordering."

[memothon]

If you implement different local payment providers that you could see higher conversion rates.

[shadowgovt]

As a result, one would assume price should crash to zero and everything would balance out because even though you're having nationwide impact, it fundamentally doesn't cost as much as making a car to make an app... So why should people pay as much for it?

Presently, it's mostly because laws sustain the author's ability to gatekeep the software, whether or not it's even running on capital they own.

One does wonder how long such laws will last, one way or the other, if their end result is a massive inequality of outcome.