It helped that Cosmo employed only one developer; that meant it didn’t have to pay a lot of coordination costs. But it was also true that writing server software has always had certain advantages compared with writing software for users. A server is a program that deals almost entirely with other programs and machines; it rarely needs to communicate directly with human beings. And when it does, the human being it needs to talk to—when it is being initially configured, for instance, or when it hits a snag—is usually a pro, a systems administrator or programmer who is already fluent in the
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