Comment by smallmancontrov

They were better off because the discomfort of shoehorning was less than the discomfort of in-house software development. The latter has changed radically so the conclusion may no longer hold. SWEs would do well to have at least one side project to calibrate their intuition about the cost of delivering and maintaining a greenfield project so that they can spot the niches which have begun to appear even as others live on borrowed time.