[julie1]

Most of the time spent is in debugging/maintaining.

Terrible code base says that the value per customers is decresaing while customers increases because your costs (of software QA) are eating your margins.

Ugly codebase that does not scale with increasing efficiency for instance.

Remember low OPEXes always beat KPEX (investment)

People focus on features in software as the only value, I think it is the recuring costs per feature that should be the value.

For instance storing digitalized book is plain stupid. The first book printed is still there because paper/ink are cost efficient in terms of recurring costs for their value of keeping information whereas servers/software ... will doom data to an end because of reccuring costs that don't scale.