zlacker

I would also think that a critical component of X there would be the opportunity cost of time spent on building in-house while competition chugs along.

>>foobar+(OP)
For sure, as was the opportunity cost of redirecting our engineering teams to produce the competing product. That is, slowing the roadmap on our core product to deliver a tangential product.

Also, we had to factor into account user management, infosec bring-up, streamlining deployment, cross training teams, etc.

This was a large co., there was generally the belief that everything can be copied relatively quickly to reach something like parity. Obviously, the discovered path has tons more learning in it that the copier doesn’t benefit from when making subsequent decisions, which can result in lots of time lost.