[snth]

That's interesting. I guess the problem software I'm thinking of is all written by software engineers for software engineers, so the "detachment" issue isn't as severe. There is some, since we work in different parts of the business. The main issues I see are that 1) a small in-house team working on internal tools doesn't have much hope of putting in the time and resources of a whole company developing the same thing for public customers 2) once a company funds an internal tool, there is usually a lot of pressure (or even a mandate) to use it, even if there are better choices 3) the in-house team is also constrained to use our other in-house tools as dependencies, whether they're better or worse than other choices.

I can see the advantage to developing something in-house if there aren't options that meet some special need, I just personally haven't seen it work out much. Maybe because of the size of companies I've worked at. I've definitely written helpful software for myself and my own team.