Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

> An example from another industry: when I worked at a small chip startup, we had in-house capability to do end-to-end chip processing (with the exception of having its own fabs), which is unusual for a small chip startup. When the first wafer of a new design came off of a fab, we'd have the wafer flown to us on a commercial flight, at which point someone would use a wafer saw to cut the wafer into individual chips so…

This post is so interesting to me, esp. the build-vs-buy spectrum. As Dan notes, a lot of software is just...not very good. It either isn't upfront with flaws (as in the case of the Postgres -> Snowflake tool), has too much scope, or is abstracted poorly. Finding things to buy/use (as in the case of open source) can often eat a lot more time than you anticipate. I've been dipping my toes into the JS ecosystem, and I keep bumping…

TFA is a bit longer than many and might take a little more time to fully digests. It does raise some good points. I want to add that one of the reasons I think it is sometimes hard to "buy things that work well" is just "work well" often means one thing for the consumer and something else to the producer. For a consumer a product works well if it does the job well for the consumer. For a producer…

The incentive for the company is money. They only need to convince people to give them money.