For larger companies that have the luxury of even contemplating developing in-house expertise the next big question is: buy or hire external expertise or develop in-house. These aren't easy questions since the investments are large and take a long time to pay off. It's easy to praise the good decisions some companies have made or laugh at the failures but someone has to make these big calls at some point and it's usually not the engineers and developers.
As engineers we should be thinking about this and telling management.
A few years back we decided to change the format all our graphics were stored in - which in turn meant calling new APIs to draw them. After a few rounds of meetings to figure out how many graphics there were and how much this would cost I realized this wasn't something we should do. I continued to estimate, but I sent a strong email to my boss "As a tech lead I forbid all in house engineers from doing this work, there is no long term value in learn how to do it, and we can hire third party contractors who know the new API better than us. Also we need to combine the contract with other division needing to do this same thing as it isn't worth scripting things for just us but a large contract will write a script for some of the work saving time and money". Immediately the whole tone of conversations changed around the company - managers (and I assume their technical people) realized I was right and all got together to get one contract to get the job done.
