Ex-technology companies. - “Organizations that spun up dedicated in-house build and deployment infrastructure have fixed engineering costs to maintain that infrastructure, and the math that convinced executives earlier–some sort of argument about the multiplicative effect on the impact of other engineers–doesn’t make as much sense anymore. But often you can’t just stop maintaining those investments, because that would require slowing down to decommission the existing systems, and ex-technology companies have little capacity for maintenance. Instead they’re focused on survival or roleplaying the motions of rapid product development despite actually spending the large majority of their time on maintenance.” // This is pretty great! Finally, a business strategy model for deciding build vs. buy. Look at the costs of building, running, and maintaining your own stack over (whatever, let’s pick a number) 3 to 5 years. Is it higher than buying, assuming revenue is single digit growth? Put another way, with software, it’s the maintenance that kills your numbers. // Also, to ponder: “They no longer believe they can change the business' outcomes through R&D efforts, and as a result they shouldn’t include engineering as a major stakeholder in business decisions."