[CuriousNinja]

In an ideal world the latter would be best. However in practice systems tend to get complicated over time as they evolve and more features etc.. are added. I think one way to look at it is that as a business to outsourcing the non-differentiated heavy lifting to another entity that has more expertise in it would let you focus on your core products. In this specific example why is using a cloud email provider any different from deciding to use power from the power grid instead of generating your own electricity.

[kaliszad]

In a healthy company, I don't think you can outsource any work on the core product without making the end result worse. Even things like translations need lots of back and forth and the feedback loop needs to be really tight. It has to be clear to the user in the culture what you want to say and the things are very subtle at times, like the eye icon in the password field to show the password. In some cultures, that might be associated with something creepy or negative maybe, but you just don't know. Show or hide may be twice as long as in the languages you know which breaks your assumptions and makes the slick UI less slick or the error messages less clear in that particular setting.

[bearbawl]

Most IT services should definitely be outsourced.

Let’s say you are a big airline company, there is absolutely not a single reason you should manage your email system. Your job is to fly airplanes not to manage some goddam emails.

The really fun part in that is that most of the big airlines actually outsourced some key part of their core job (IT wise I mean), like how they manage seats and load, this kind of stuff, while keeping some absolute non-core IT services internal, like an internal Exchange system with dozens and dozens of people to manage it.