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This is a good Joel post, but the bar has moved significantly. "If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what". The question is, what is "C

This is a good Joel post, but the bar has moved significantly. "If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what". The question is, what is "Core Business Function"? If you were an internal tech company in 2000s, hosting your own servers was a "core business function", as being a tech company meant that tech was core business function. However, as tech got more sophisticated, the domain of "core function" became more focused per company Another example is the rise of fabless semiconductor companies. Even until recently, Intel had superior chip design and fabrication capabilities (thus intel's tick-tock strategy). AMD founder Jerry Sanders claimed "Real men have fabs" but AMD's spinoff of GlobalFoundaries look like a genius move now. What you think of "core business function" is going to change over time.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
To add, more and more of these "core business functions" had to be invented; nowadays you can get everything - from data persistence to push notifications to spinning up servers worldwide - set up in a short amount of time as long as you have a credit card. I'm pretty sure now that most businesses / tech companies are glued components with a core idea and a lot of marketing attached to it.
nailer 4y ago
> If you were an internal tech company in 2000s, hosting your own servers was a "core business function", as being a tech company meant that tech was core business function. We have a modern version of this - people that aren't selling cloud services running their own Kubernetes farms rather than just buying cheap k8s or whatever other orchestration solution they like from a cloud hosting provider.