" people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, "
Where do you get that figure? The vast majority of people writing software are not paid enough salary + benefits to come anywhere close to 50% of the revenue their work is responsible for earning.
It's a good point. It varies widely depending on the industry, but even in the software industry a good rule of thumb is that IT costs about 10% of revenue (some places are as high as 30%, some as low as 2%). But that includes all the management (not executive management) and support staff. The spend for sales and marketing is much higher than development (though sometimes most of that goes out of the company, paying for sales channels, etc).
In companies that actually manage to get to revenue, may be. But if you take together all the software companies, including many that have not yet and may never get to revenue at all, I think it would be much closer.
How so? The vast majority of software workers aren’t at VC or self-funded startups, nor do they work for small boutiques developing web/mobile apps or managing eCommerce deployments for local mom-n-pops. They’re employed at larger companies and defense contractors where the overwhelming majority of revenue goes to pay all workers (of which they’re a small fraction), expenses such as leases, or profit for executives.
Where do you get that figure? The vast majority of people writing software are not paid enough salary + benefits to come anywhere close to 50% of the revenue their work is responsible for earning.