Disclosure: I wrote the piece.<p>But anyway, I'm still with andrewvc here. I concur that NIH - the pathology you're describing above - is equally unproductive, and that deciding when to build or buy is a difficult question to answer.<p>That all being said, it seems fairly clear that due to a wide variety of factors, heterogeneity is accelerating, which makes life more difficult for general purpose, volume solutions. Think of it this way: Windows XP was, for a lot of people, a more than acceptable compute interface. But it wasn't designed for phones, devices, tablets, and the like. And attempts to bend it to that purpose largely failed.<p>We need different tools for different jobs, and with the number of job increasing, sometimes there just isn't a good tool available. At which point rolling your own is not only appropriate, but desirable.<p>Point being that specialization is the new norm, and as such roll your own - or at least leveraging the results of someone else's roll your own - will become more common. IMHO, and so on.