- Tim O'Reilly
Build vs. Buy
A paper tiger always beats a real tiger
- Chinese proverb
The difficulty faced by many companies is whether to buy the ingredients, products or even companies they need, or build the ingredients, products or companies they need. There is a division within IBM whose sole purpose is to seek, manage and integrate acquisitions of smaller companies (smaller than IBM, that is) into IBM. They look at what IBM’s strategic needs are, and often, instead of building a computer software or hardware product, they buy an entire company to satisfy that need immediately. Buy acquiring a company and its products, they (a) reduce the risk of failing to build it themselves and (b) buy valuable time-to-market. IBM knows that it is easy to come up with a better theoretical product (a paper tiger) than one that is already on the market (a real tiger).
Even if you cannot find the exact ingredient you had in mind, you might find a piece that, if you were to make an adjustment to your product designs, you could use. Consider using off-the-shelf alternatives to ingredients in your product even if it involves making a compromise to your ideal vision of your product. Remember, your immediate objective is, at minimal cost, to decide if your product can become a reality. You can add improvements and optimizations later if you want to, when the revenue is flooding in to your company, but this is not the time to think about making a perfect product.
For the moment, though, think like IBM. Save time and money, and reduce risk by using off-the-shelf ingredients wherever you can.
It might be that you can make your entire product from existing ingredients. That is not necessarily bad. If your product is easy to make, it might mean your patent has to be strong to protect you, but that might be acceptable. It is not necessary for you to design every element of your product from scratch to patent it. Again, you can improve a basic working product later, perhaps only at that later stage involving plastic injection molding, once you have proven the market for your product.
- Any time you have the choice to substitute an off-the-shelf element in your product for one you were considering making, use the off-the-shelf element.
Figure 1 – a fancy way of tying a cord to a wall
Case in point: I needed a way to fasten the honeycomb part of product to the pond wall. Still infatuated with my newfound competence of CAD, and yet ignorant of what it will cost to make plastic parts, I came up with a design for a piece of hard plastic that could be fastened to the pond wall and to which a cord could be attached, pictured in Figure 1. To make the mold for it might cost $5k in the
Contrast that to the illustration in Figure 2, an off-the-shelf solution in the form of anchors and screw-plus-hook combinations, which can are available in a hardware store for less than ten cents a set, reducing the need to make a mold.
Figure 2 – a simple off-the-shelf alternative
End of chapter exercise
· Build a rough prototype of your product with parts that are available in a home improvement store or cardboard of various thicknesses for the parts you cannot buy off-the-shelf. Tape everything together with duct tape or regular sticky tape if you need to. It’s not going to be functional of course, but what you learn from this exercise will likely help you discover some design problems you missed and may help you solve them.
· When you have completed the task, revisit every single part of your rough prototype to see if parts of it are available off-the-shelf. For example, if you had designed a new steam iron, can you break open a two-dollar toy water pistol and use the water nozzle from it as the water sprayer for your steam iron? The purpose of this is to give you some exercise in prototype improvement.
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