If the cost or the size wasn't a constraint, for sure Ford would build a car 5x as big or 5x as expensive.
The website size isn't a constraint here, if it was, they would works on it and make it smaller. It's only a constraint for highly technical people here. Currently at my job I'm optimizing some queries that takes way too long. It has been like that for years but we hit a wall recently, our SQL Server can't take it anymore. I always found it stupid that it took so long to optimize it... but at the end of the day, the clients just didn't care that it took 3 seconds to load the page. I could be working on more features right now, something that the client actually care about.
What makes the number of employees relevant to the size? Well if you were the only one building that website, you would know everything about it right? You would always use the exact same component, reuse everything you can, you already know every single part of the code. Add a second employee, now you don't know exactly what he does, you do know some of it but some time you forget and you may duplicate something or do it badly or whatever. At one point, something is just too big to be understood by a any single employee and you get code badly reused, stuff that serve no direct purpose too but make maintenance easier, etc... You never decrease the size simply because it's never worth it to but each and every single one of the employee add stuff to it.
This is a bad example. Tesla is a failing/failed car company that cant produce 200k cars per year. Ford has their truck program that sells that in a few months.
>Comparing a digital text product (Moby Dick) with a digital text product (a NYT article) is as close as it gets.
Comparing a book vs a timely article is unfair. NYT produces content daily to encourage shares and people clicking on various links on the website. Links, Images, Videos, comments, etc... None of those are available in dumb text.
Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive?
> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product
They may want this but they don’t need it. They successfully produced their product in the past without it.
> If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb.
Irrelevant and likely false. If anything, books and other text media tend to get smaller after subsequent editing and revising.
> A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.
Comparing a digital text product (Moby Dick) with a digital text product (a NYT article) is as close as it gets.