2023-09-19
Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome is a tendency to build in-house software instead of utilizing existing options. In its simplest form, it's a constant need to reinvent the wheel. Here are some notable examples:
Netscape Navigator: Netscape decided to rewrite its entire codebase for Netscape Navigator 5.0, believing that starting from scratch would enable them to leapfrog the competition. Unfortunately, the project took much longer than expected, and by the time Netscape 6.0 (5.0 was skipped altogether) was released in 2000, Internet Explorer had taken over the browser market. Netscape's market share never recovered.
Digg v4: Social news aggregator Digg decided to rewrite its entire codebase for version 4, moving away from MySQL and Memcache to Cassandra. The move was not well-received by users, and numerous bugs and performance issues led to a mass exodus to competitors like Reddit. The company's value plummeted, and they were eventually sold for a fraction of their peak value.
Rewriting Quake by id Software: John Carmack, a co-founder of id Software, decided to rewrite the Quake game engine from scratch in C++, moving away from C. The rewrite ended up taking much longer than anticipated and led to numerous bugs and stability issues, damaging the game's reputation.
Friendster: One of the first social networking sites, Friendster, faced scalability issues as more users joined. Instead of improving and optimizing their existing platform, they decided to rewrite the entire codebase. The result was a buggy, slow platform that frustrated users and led to a rapid decline in the user base.
HealthCare.gov: When the U.S. government launched HealthCare.gov in 2013, it was a disaster due to numerous technical issues. Despite the government's massive resources, the site suffered from poor performance and frequent crashes. A key reason for the site's issues was that the government insisted on custom-building much of the site's functionality rather than using proven existing solutions.