More than two scales in fact, I can think of three: scale of firm, scale of distribution, scale of product.
In most industries scale of firm goes hand-in-hand with scale of distribution. Software breaks the paradigm, so we have to be careful to say which scale we're talking about.
Obviously, with distribution, software has insane economies of scale, since we can copy-paste our products nearly for free. That's why we can have small firms with a large distribution, unlike most industries.
With scale of firm, we face some of the same diseconomies as other industries. Communication and coordination problems grow superlinearly with firm size.
Effort and resources needed also grow superlinearly with product scale. That's also true of other engineering disciplines though. Making a tower twice as high is more than twice as hard. Part of it is the complexity inherent in the product, and part of it is that a more complex design needs a bigger team, so you run into the firm diseconomies of scale mentionned above.
In most industries scale of firm goes hand-in-hand with scale of distribution. Software breaks the paradigm, so we have to be careful to say which scale we're talking about.
Obviously, with distribution, software has insane economies of scale, since we can copy-paste our products nearly for free. That's why we can have small firms with a large distribution, unlike most industries.
With scale of firm, we face some of the same diseconomies as other industries. Communication and coordination problems grow superlinearly with firm size.
Effort and resources needed also grow superlinearly with product scale. That's also true of other engineering disciplines though. Making a tower twice as high is more than twice as hard. Part of it is the complexity inherent in the product, and part of it is that a more complex design needs a bigger team, so you run into the firm diseconomies of scale mentionned above.