[jnovek]

Presuming for a moment that you’re under 40 for the sake of conversation:

Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?”

It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.

[ghaff]

Certainly part of it is that, as you have been around longer and maybe moved higher up, you probably better appreciate how expensive it really is to have "just" a small team doing something that could largely be outsourced. You have the developers of course, their benefits, their manager's salary and benefits and some small slice of attention up the management chain and across other functional groups like HR. And it's just one more distraction from the things that actually matter to running the business.

[jnovek]

Everything in this conversation is dancing around the same thing: core competency.

Something I saw in action building a startup is that the fewer people you have on your team, the more efficient they are.

As you grow, it’s wise to focus your headcount on your core competency and outsource everything else so that you are committing the organizational expense of more employees to all and only what you need as a business.

Of course, enterprise stuff is not all roses. You still have to have someone with product expertise. There’s vendor lock-in. Enterprise software is often oversold. Etc etc.

There is no panacea, just stuff that works better in different situations.