A mediocre engineer is worth on the order of a million bucks a year to one of these big companies... one engineer can create a reasonably large amount of 'capital' - that doesn't make it cheap.
Yeah, you could build that capital for yourself rather than for a big company, if you wanted to; that doesn't mean it wasn't expensive.
That, and I think that big successful projects take a lot more than just someone who can build a decent website. Take friendster... one of my favorite examples 'cause it was one of the real-world cases of a company dying due to insufficient resources being put into systems administration and scaling. They were in the right place, at the right time, with the right product to become what facebook is now; they got traction, but due to performance and reliability issues, they ended up leaving an opening for Facebook to come in and eat their lunch.
And even getting to the point where facebook was is really hard.
I mean, it happens; Craigslist is a famous example, but usually you need more than one engineer worth of capital to build one of these things, and you need more than just engineers.
I dunno. every time I step out into other industries, I'm shocked at how little even skilled people are paid. I dunno much about animation, but I'm pretty sure you could setup, say, a small publishing house and support it for a few years on a million bucks. I'm certain you could start up a restaurant on that kind of scratch, and if you were the business type, you could turn that into a chain. I mean, sure, you'd need more for promotion/advertising, but that's just as true of the tech industry.
I mean, sure, a business starting with a million bucks is unlikely to become a multi-billion dollar business, but... I think it's a reasonable amount to start a reasonable business... and I think that's how McDonalds, at least, got it's start.
Yeah, you could build that capital for yourself rather than for a big company, if you wanted to; that doesn't mean it wasn't expensive.
That, and I think that big successful projects take a lot more than just someone who can build a decent website. Take friendster... one of my favorite examples 'cause it was one of the real-world cases of a company dying due to insufficient resources being put into systems administration and scaling. They were in the right place, at the right time, with the right product to become what facebook is now; they got traction, but due to performance and reliability issues, they ended up leaving an opening for Facebook to come in and eat their lunch.
And even getting to the point where facebook was is really hard.
I mean, it happens; Craigslist is a famous example, but usually you need more than one engineer worth of capital to build one of these things, and you need more than just engineers.