> It's also an a large ongoing liability to have a sizable in-house development effort when it's not your main business. Departments need to be staffed and run, business plans made etc.
This is the same ideology that led to companies outsourcing everything from facility management and cleaning services as the first victims to stuff as critical as IT operations.
Yes, it is a liability and likely also a higher cost (e.g. due to collective wage agreements) to do that stuff yourself. On the other side, you have the large liability of having no direct control over staff and work quality any more - you're entirely at the mercy of your contractors (who are incentivized to find not the best people, but the people willing to be paid the least).
> ...no direct control over...work quality any more...
This is important. Just a few days ago here on HN, there was a good discussion on how deliverables quality on seemingly "mundane" device chargers (in this example, one that was arguably for early Kindles) can vary wildly, while maintaining the same price point, with the sub-standard quality yielding more profits to the seller, and higher-quality units yielding less profits.
This is a impedance mismatch between what the buyer knows and values and what the seller knows and values. With a time slippage between the time the buyer makes a decision and when the buyer's organization figuring out the real ramifications. By the time an organization has outsourced enough to lose competency to not even know the impedance mismatch and time slippage exists or scope it if they're aware of its existence, sometimes they will find might be cheaper to in-source in the first place. My personal rule of thumb going in to evaluate these decisions is if the procedural complexity surrounding such software artifacts rises above a certain level, it is likely better to keep it in-house. Where that level is lays the art of business, it is largely experience-based.
This is the same ideology that led to companies outsourcing everything from facility management and cleaning services as the first victims to stuff as critical as IT operations.
Yes, it is a liability and likely also a higher cost (e.g. due to collective wage agreements) to do that stuff yourself. On the other side, you have the large liability of having no direct control over staff and work quality any more - you're entirely at the mercy of your contractors (who are incentivized to find not the best people, but the people willing to be paid the least).