[cortesoft]

You are always going to have to rely on other service providers for critical things - networking, power, etc. I don’t think there is going to be some massive move for every business to be in control of every aspect of their supply chain. It simply isn’t feasible.

[jondubois]

It's different. If a business has the option to do something themselves and doing so would cost them less in the long run and give them more flexibility, then doing it themselves is a competitive advantage.

If having solar panels becomes consistently cheaper than buying electricity from the grid (per megawatt), then individuals and businesses will all switch to solar panels... Especially if the business uses a lot of electricity.

The main reason that PaaS solution are popular now is because of advertising and hype. It's a bubble.

[cortesoft]

That is interesting, because the advice I always hear for businesses is to keep in house their core business and contract/outsource everything else. That 'bring everything in house' strategy only works for the biggest companies that have enough scale.

For almost everyone else, the cost of providing a profit margin to the contracting company is dwarfed by the savings you get from the economy of scale the contractor is able to provide.

Really, this is the microeconomics version of the ideas behind free trade. It is better to produce what you are best at and trade for the rest.

[jondubois]

I think that any business which hires developers in-house should consider their software systems as being their core business. That's were the competitive edge comes from.

Most companies who use BaaS or PaaS these days already hire developers and sometimes even DevOps engineers; for them it doesn't make sense to outsource huge parts of their software. Some open source systems just work really well.

For example, I tried several times to launch a business around my current popular open source project but it hasn't worked so far; the problem I have is that companies only need consulting for a short while at the beginning to adapt the system to their use case and then it just works perfectly so they dont need me anymore.

When I reach out to a previous customer who didn't contact me in months, it's very common to hear that the system has been running perfectly without any issues at all. Even a couple of companies which have millions of users. Most of them never needed any consulting at all. So yes, it's much cheaper for a company in the long run to self-host in many cases.

[logifail]

>> keep in house their core business and contract/outsource everything else

That makes sense, except we'd need some kind of working definition for "core business", since that's not necessarily self-evident.

Some businesses seem to think that the management of their brand is their only core business, and everything else is fair game for outsourcing.