Thank you for taking the time to write this. "CEOs think they are buying an appliance" sums it all up perfectly. I hold them accountable because they're paid so

Thank you for taking the time to write this. "CEOs think they are buying an appliance" sums it all up perfectly. I hold them accountable because they're paid so much that they should know better, but you're right that a lot of people try very hard to mislead them, and sometimes they're even incentivized to be misled. If you build in-house to suit your data models and workflow, there is a chance you won't ever get the thing deployed, then you look bad. You can always sign up for Salesforce, and it might be bad, but it's running so you can hide the details of the badness from the board. This is why when I wrote another post on saving 500K for my company, the two-slide presentation I was asked to write went through a lead, a director, and a lower-level C-suite member before being allowed to reach the top of the pyramid.