alt Hacker NewsAnyone who's seen an enterprise deal close or dealt with enterprise customer requests will know this, the build vs buy calculus has always been there yet companies still buy. Until you can get AI to the point where it equivalent to a 20 person engineering team, people are not going to build their own Snowflake, Salesforce, Slack or ATS. Maybe that day is 3 years away but when that happens the world will be very different
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> Until you can get AI to the point where it equivalent to a 20 person engineering team
I think that’s gonna happen when you don’t need software and AI just does it all.
I agree generally, but some of these enterprise contracts are eye-watering. If the choice is $2M/year with a 3-year minimum contract, or rolling your own, I think calculus really has shifted.
With that said, the entire business world does not understand that software is more than just code. Even if you could write code instantly, making enterprise software would still take time, because there are simply so many high-stakes decisions to make, and so much fractal detail.
Companies do make/buy decisions on everything, it just software. Cleaning services are not expensive, yet companies contract them instead of hiring staff.
This is called transaction cost economics, if anyone’s interested.