Amazingly (and I have been watching this for years), there are still organizations out there that try to re-invent the wheel as often as they can. I am talking about people that happily keep on building their own project-specific windowing toolkit, standard gui controls, collection implementations, XML-parsers, HTTP-protocols, object-relational-mapping layers, report engines, content management systems, workflow systems, you name it.
Typically those organizations are either departments within larger corporations, who in some way or another gained a jester's license, while the corporation swallows the costs of their doomed endeavours, or small startup vendors that managed to convince a clueless customer about the absolute necessity for their futile product. Customers that just don't know they could get a better product for a fraction amount or even for free from somewhere else, without the pain of being the vendor's guinea pig for an unproven technology, that no one else uses.
Sometimes it's cool to be an early adopter. But then let me be an early adopter of something innovative that really fits my needs, and not the 47th clone of another "have-been-there-before"-product from the little ISV next door.
Please, stop this insanity. Let's do what we were supposed to do: Develop Applications. Leave the other stuff to the experts...
