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by pseudalopex 218 days ago
> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program.

You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/
1 comments
BearOso 218 days ago
That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.
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pseudalopex 214 days ago
> $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.

$250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course.

A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.

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