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Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)
There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". We've previously discussed Marc Andreessen's quote that tech hiring can't be inefficient here and here: Let's launch right into it.
Ben now believes that one of the big mistakes he made as CTO was not putting much more effort into vendor selection, even when the decision appeared to be a slam dunk, and more strongly considering moving many systems to custom in-house versions sooner. American firms didn't lose their dominance in multiple industries while being more efficient; if anything, market inefficiencies allowed them to hang on to marketshare much longer than you would naively expect if you just looked at the technical merit of their products. Thanks to Fabian Giesen, Yossi Kreinen, Peter Bhat Harkins, Ben Kuhn, Laurie Tratt, John Hergenroeder, Tao L., @softminus, Justin Blank, @deadalnix, Dan Lew, @ollyrobot, Sophia Wisdom, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, Kevin Downey, and @PapuaHardyNet for comments/corrections/discussion.
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