Software has also benefitted from a massive tax subsidy relative to hardware, as the latter requires a massive capital investment. Hardware requires expensive real estate, and benefits from saving the spending, whereas software can exist on debt and small footprints.
That may have been the case prior to section 174, when you could invest massively in something, write it off as a loss, and then pivot to reusing it profitably, but now I think that all R&D efforts are equally discouraged.
