NIH

The mentality of Not-Invented-Here will kill any technology company these days.
I was floored with this marketing material from a technology company. I masked out relevant names.

This area concerns ownership of the components that comprise a product. The need to license one or modules carries an array of potential implications and dependencies, from incomplete integration and sub-optimal performance to delayed updates and lack of in-house research and knowledge for a specific area, which could lead to lower effectiveness – such as the inability to thoroughly address blended functions.

The Company’s product technology has no dependencies on outside components. The result is a completely unified and highly optimized solution architecture that maximizes performance and enables the highest level of effectiveness. Furthermore, Company maintains its own, extensive intelligence network, as well as its own research lab staffed by a world-renowned security research team. The result is the ability to provide thorough and timely intelligence and content updates, thereby enabling organizations to efficiently and effectively handle the rapidly changing conditions characteristic of today’s computing environments.

In comparison. With the exception of one, all other competitors license/obtain one or more components of their solution from a third party. As discussed above, this arrangement carries with it the significant potential for negative side effects, from poor performance to stale content and feature sets.

A public statement like this should scare both customers and investors away. Any company, any product, in the world must leverage a supply chain to provide components that are simply impractical to produce in-house. Customers care if products can solve their problems with reasonable costs. If company A license others’ technologies and produce the products cheaper and faster, it will always win over company B that insisted on doing everything in-house.

The argument on quality is really 100% wrong. Would you have a higher quality health care if you treat your own ailments? The clear advantage of industrialization is specialization. A technology is almost always better when produced by companies specialized in that. In fact, that’s why anyone buy any product to begin with: they don’t have the means to solve the problem themselves economically or effectively. By extension, why would anyone claim a product is of higher quality if everything is produced in-house?

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