[hitekker]

An internal "platform" team is often just a mismanaged infrastructure team. Careerist managers and engineers advocate for a sweeping, complex, centralized system which competes with real-world products sold by outside companies. It starts with "my team will reduce costs" and then it snowballs into "the platform delivers value! Look at all the people working on the platform! We need to hire more people to build even more! We make money!"

A few years later, the platform's code is rotting, its interfaces are unusable, and all the original proponents have chosen to depart rather than to maintain the mess they created. The company is stuck with a legacy system, far inferior to the real-world product, which has been shaped by market forces and not the political dynamics of one, single company.

Polemic aside, I think internal engineering platforms are ok to build when the industry solution hasn't matured yet, isn't available, or is otherwise too expensive. Otherwise, I think the infrastructure manager should seek out the minimum abstraction (and team) that enables the simplest path towards buying from the outside.