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"What these hyperventilating "visionaries" overlooked is that the market pays for value added." THIS. Best quote in the article, and sums up the problem with

• ataggart 16y ago
  Joel is correct, but there are cases where the "trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything" is in fact adding value, namely, their entrepreneurial insight to recognize that a market is in disequilibrium, that current means are available to meet current demands, but that such has gone unnoticed. In fact, having such insights is what defines an entrepreneur. I would recommend that anyone interested in the economic theory of entrepreneurship read Israel Kirzner's seminal work, "Competition and entrepreneurship." http://books.google.com/books?id=OFNVW3N9hUUC http://books.google.com/books?id=OFNVW3N9hUUC
  • kragen 16y ago
    Sometimes they're adding the value of handling the hassle of outsourcing: firing suppliers who don't deliver, knowing those who do, planning for risks ahead of time.
  • jsharpe 16y ago
    Exactly. Coordination of different systems is added value. It's like mechanical turk. Amazon is not actually providing anything except a connection between those who need work done, and those who are willing to do it. They're not adding anything besides a connection.
• joe_the_user 16y ago
  Just for perspective, I think code reuse was the panacea of the last batch of "business BS". Tests driving development is more the latest batch. It's to the credit of software gurus like Robert Martin that Object Orientation is no longer really sold as a way to magically get software components to use on your other projects, that inclusion is preferred over inheritance etc. Today, the idea that you can substitute writing tests for design is the "BS", the excessive paradigm touting, of today. Which is to say that it's an unbalance presentation of new, useful tools. Tests are great but don't let you get by without high-level design unless your application is so simple it wouldn't need it. But objects were and are great too. They just don't magically morph a class declaration into good code or reusable code. You still have to put effort into that part of things.
  • nostrademons 16y ago
    You can substitute tests for design - once you already know what the design is. It doesn't work quite so well when you have no clue what the overall picture is going to look like. Of course, this is like saying that you could've predicted the future with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
• petercooper 16y ago
  I'm going with this instead: If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what. Mostly because it's practical advice that's commonly ignored, rather than an observation.
  • api 16y ago
    I think that's good advice for many situations. But the problem with this and all business advice is that it's very situation-dependent. Good advice for a B2B company might be horrible advice for a B2C company. Good advice for a software company might be horrible advice for a hardware company or a marketing company... and so on. The business landscape changes too. Good advice from two years ago might be mediocre or bad advice today.
  • dagw 16y ago
    Half of our core business function is based on open source code. However we have people who are intimately familiar with that code and very comfortable hacking it. This gives us the best of both worlds. We can quickly fix bugs and add features, but we can also leverage the work of countless very smart people adding features which we would never have time to develop ourselves.
    • petercooper 16y ago
      Perhaps, then, the statement needs to be brought up to date. Something like.. if it's your core function, implement it yourself or know the code you're using as well as if you did!