Comment by orangesite

It's going to take a lot of arguing but I predict we'll end up back where we started some time ago in the 70's:

The computer hardware is the asset.

Software engineer salaries are the operational expense of that asset.

Fanciful: It was only a brief period of time where some companies were able to resell the operational efforts of their in-house staff to other owners of computer hardware assets. Now it's all bespoke operational activities just like steel presses and sawmills.