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Comment by mewpmewp2 | Hacker News Reader

With no or minimal communication how is it possible to build anything new? In real world if you need to build something new and it requires 10 different companies to do that, it would be virtually impossible.

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Punctuated equilibrium.

A lot of customer value comes from companies that assemble ideas that have existed in isolation. Customers think they hate that, but the numbers say they are wrong.

Foods are an early example. Most are rearranging the same dozen ingredients in different quantities and orders of operation.

Vertical integration is not an all or nothing proposition. Companies can make pretty unique solutions by specializing a couple of pieces.

The same way the economy has always built something new. We have thousands of years of experience in doing that.

You don’t try to build something new with 10,000 developers, if that’s where you have become confused.

I think the confusion is because "something new" isn't necessarily a completely new, disconnected product. It could be something like adding multi-lingual support to an existing product. In that case, you often do need to coordinate across many teams to get the new feature implemented, which can be a huge pain in a micro-service architecture.

No more than it is a pain in a service architecture – being the exactly same thing, just in a different economy. As always, if a service doesn't do what you need, you build your own in-house. Just because there is a product on the market is that is kind of, sort of, but not really, what you need doesn't mean you must use it.

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