slice the pie

To divide something into portions to be shared between multiple people. Now that so many companies are competing with the ride-share app, they're having to slice the pie really thin between them. I hate having to slice the pie of our software profits with Spikerosoft, but there's no other way of getting onto their devices.

slice the pie, to

To share the profits. This metaphor has largely replaced the early-twentieth-century slice of the melon, but exists side by side with the more literal piece of the action. It comes from nineteenth-century America. T. N. Page used a version in Red Rock (1898): “Does he want to keep all the pie for himself?” And the Boston Sunday Herald (1967): “An appellate court victory . . . cut Weymouth’s total property valuation . . . to give the town a bigger slice of the sales tax pie.” A related term, no matter how you slice it, is a twentieth-century Americanism meaning “no matter how you look at it.” Carl Sandburg used it in The People, Yes (1936): “No matter how thick or how thin you slice it it’s still baloney.”