<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been fortunate enough to work at companies where engineers were trusted to make small purchasing decisions. It works well for a while, but eventually everyone accumulates a lot of random recurring charges and the company cracks down.&lt;p&gt;$21 is nothing for a one-time spend.&lt;p&gt;$21 per month per employee is now $252&amp;#x2F;year per employee, but now you also need someone managing all of these licenses and accounting. Every new employee or team change requires some juggling of licenses with associated turn-around times before that person can get started.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not bad when it&amp;#x27;s just a couple key pieces of software, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t take long before every engineer has some mix of 20 different subscription tools and platforms and licenses and you&amp;#x27;re on the phone with a different vendor every week doing the annual subscription renewal pricing negotiation dance. The sales people know how this works and would prefer to wear you down with endless conference calls until you get tired of negotiating and just pay the new, higher price they&amp;#x27;re asking.&lt;p&gt;Soon, all of those &amp;quot;cheap&amp;quot; tools have added up to $1000&amp;#x2F;month or more per employee with a couple people dedicated to managing these licenses and negotiating with vendors all of the time. And it&amp;#x27;s terrible.&lt;p&gt;When the tool isn&amp;#x27;t easily replaceable, you deal with it. I&amp;#x27;m not sure I see that with Docker Desktop, though. When you get a new hire, do you tell them to submit a ticket with licensing and wait until they can get their Docker Desktop license? Or do you simply write some documentation about how to accomplish tasks without using Docker Desktop so you can remove another external dependency? Teams generally gravitate toward the latter.</text><parent_chain><item><author>namdnay</author><text>That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc…&lt;p&gt;Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time&lt;p&gt;Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation</text></item><item><author>qeternity</author><text>So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made.&lt;p&gt;The business license costs $21&amp;#x2F;month, probably less in reality.&lt;p&gt;Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k&amp;#x2F;year assets over a very core piece of software for $250&amp;#x2F;year?&lt;p&gt;Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/docker_desktop_no_longer_free/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>marcosdumay</author><text>This.&lt;p&gt;Buying anything on my organization costs something around $10k. Add your price to this to discover the total we are spending.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s on financial cost. The opportunity cost of stopping technical people to handle the technical details of an acquisition is just huge, and larger the most differentiation there is on the market.</text><parent_chain><item><author>namdnay</author><text>That’s assuming some kind soul in engineering management has the patience and leverage to guide this through 10 layers of purchasing, procurement, finance, legal etc…&lt;p&gt;Another likely outcome is that it’s “easier” for teams to switch to another tool (easier in that at least they’re not waiting on a third party for approval) and everyone loses a lot of time&lt;p&gt;Big corporations are not the most efficient beasts for this kind of situation</text></item><item><author>qeternity</author><text>So many people in this thread don’t understand how enterprise decisions get made.&lt;p&gt;The business license costs $21&amp;#x2F;month, probably less in reality.&lt;p&gt;Do you really think that businesses are going to jeopardize the workflows of their $250k&amp;#x2F;year assets over a very core piece of software for $250&amp;#x2F;year?&lt;p&gt;Any alternative has switching costs and risks. Companies will just pay this. I see so many people saying “just do these 10 steps and it’s basically the same”. It just ain’t worth it for $250</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/docker_desktop_no_longer_free/</url></story>