[billyhoffman]

Of course there are more factors. We are not blindly outsourcing everything to services and we are equally not blindly building everything in house. Those factors often come down to core competencies and “best and highest use” of time. These will vary by company. Case in point: lots of companies use highcharts and D3 for charting. why? Because building and maintaining a world class graphing system is not their core business and doesn’t meaningfully advance their business. And outside of a small minority of companies building your own charting from Scratch does not provide a meaningful advantage for your customers or over your competitors.

Deciding what is core and should be in house and what is not is hard and it’s only partially a technology decision. It’s primarily a business/market decision and being able to do those is a mark of a good CTO.