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The vast majority of successful tech companies definitely treat their code as assets.

I think you’re confusing 2 things. The technical and developmental side, where code is a liability that needs to be maintained, and the business/usage side, where code is definitely an asset that provides your company with additional leverage against competitors.

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Most code doesn’t give you leverage against competitors. Building in-house for 100X the cost (or at 1% quality) of using an AWS component confers a competitive disadvantage unless you have lots of customers who pay a lot to do business with someone “not on amazon” but even then you probably shouldn’t be building it yourself. This is generally implied when people say “code is a liability”.

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