[shiroiushi]

>I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks.

>It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. ... nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.

Was your solution really good enough? Or as good as the in-house solution?

At one big tech company I previously worked at, they frequently expended a lot of resources coming up with new solutions for things, because their new solutions might perform 5% better than something more off-the-shelf, of course at a much greater cost. They started recognizing this after a while and tried to cut down on it.