I couldn't disagree with your points more, so I'll address them in detail. Thinking of in-house software as a product is useful at modern, flexible companies; a

I couldn't disagree with your points more, so I'll address them in detail. Thinking of in-house software as a product is useful at modern, flexible companies; and here's why: > It does not have real pricing. It absolutely does have real cost pricing, in terms of the number of engineers working on it! This is why internal tools or developer productivity teams at the typical Dunder Mifflin Paper Company style orgs are chronically underfunded, and generally seens as a joke by the business people — which naturally leads to bad hires and a generally weak effort in that direction. It's self-fulfilling downward spiral. A bunch of modern companies counteract that by treating internal tools and developer productivity as a product, which communicates not just the cost, but also the effective advantage that the company gains, and improves it over time just like the company's external-facing products would. > You can't sell more of it and increase the customer base. There are innumerable exceptions, but a single 27 billion dollar one is Slack, which started off as an internal tool [1] for Stewart Butterfield's company Tiny Speck. > You can't drop money-losing products. Wrong! In fact, you can absolutely drop "money-losing" products that don't have enough internal customers, and do a much better job than a tired team without a product mindset complaining that "no one uses this tool anyway" as they try to fix a ticket that was filed 7 years ago. > Here's a classic memo on that subject I don't know about "classic", it seems to be the experience of one company selling proprietary software that was founded 40 years ago, and very likely has a captive market due to a first mover advantage. I strongly counsel anyone starting out today against having over-applying this narrow "What business is the company in" mindset. In my experience, it encourages frat-house "I am working on the real product" attitudes, and destroys internal productivity, because zero people are incentivized to think positively about that. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History