There is a huge difference. While progress before meant that workers could be more productive, the amount of workers you needed increased as the amount of goods that were produced increased. It took more people to produce more value.
It doesn’t take any additional people if MS sells one copy of Windows or Office than if they sell a million. The same is true for Facebook, and AWS (of course the retail side needs more but that’s even becoming more automated). As I said below, Apple and Amazon are the only two of the five big tech companies that have products or service that requires a lot of people as they scale and Apple’s “employees” are contract workers overseas.
That also means that the modern “factory workers” - software engineers, product managers, etc. produce an outsized value, are a larger multiplier and get paid a lot more.
The entire concept of software and is that the marginal cost is 0. If it gets to the point where there is a one to one ratio between worker and service, it becomes yet another commoditized race to the bottom.
There is also nothing stopping many of the three billion people in India and China from producing these services and now all of the protectionist policies in the world won’t protect “good American jobs”.
But as far as Amazon and Apple, that’s just the point. Apple’s “manufacturing employees” are overseas and Amazon is trying to automate more so that they don’t need as many FCs.
It doesn’t take any additional people if MS sells one copy of Windows or Office than if they sell a million. The same is true for Facebook, and AWS (of course the retail side needs more but that’s even becoming more automated). As I said below, Apple and Amazon are the only two of the five big tech companies that have products or service that requires a lot of people as they scale and Apple’s “employees” are contract workers overseas.
That also means that the modern “factory workers” - software engineers, product managers, etc. produce an outsized value, are a larger multiplier and get paid a lot more.