Buy! Buy! Buy! The Pros and Cons of Building Everything Yourself

“But it’s fun to build stuff!” — Oh, my sweet summer child!

There are many classic debates out there that can inflame tensions amongst even the most reasonable people: Pepsi versus Coke, iPhone versus Android, or cream on the scone before or after the jam. There is no right answer to any of these questions, and so much depends on preference and context. That said, I would like to add one more to the mix:

Build versus Buy

You’ve probably all been in this scenario:

1. You’re busily building some cool new stuff that’s going to help your company hyperscale (maybe, possibly).
2. Some orthogonal requirement comes up for some supporting tech or platform that you don’t have (examples I’ve seen include: SSO, analytics platforms, taxonomy management systems and entire BI suites!)
3. There are off-the-shelf solutions that do most of the job, but no one seems to be prepared to invest either time to investigate them or money to buy them.
4. A random stakeholder brings up a niche edge case that no off-the-shelf platform could ever handle (and we’ve always done it like that here).
5. Eventually, someone pipes up and says “Hey, let’s just…