Businesses differentiate when there's a good reason or no common solution. Nobody creates a new calendar picker or database or... "just because" but because there's no easy alternative. Yeah, there will be exceptions, but if you're paid to create something, your manager will usually not be impressed by "but the wheel I reinvented is slightly different!", unless you justify it with a specific requirement.
> Yeah, there will be exceptions, but if you're paid to create something, your manager will usually not be impressed by "but the wheel I reinvented is slightly different!", unless you justify it with a specific requirement.
Depends on the org. Some places incentivize wheel reinvention by having rubrics that basically resolve to “if you want to level up, you need ‘org wide impact’”, which translates into “all the existing databases suck (for …reasons…) so I need to write our own”.
The company might not actually want this behavior but if the people in charge don’t see how important it is to make sure incentives align with expected behavior, the wrong behavior will always happen. So while it makes absolutely no sense to write your own database and Calendar Picker Platform (Now With a Fully Staffed Team!), unless the rubric incentivizes the right thing that is all people are gonna do.
I get where you're coming from and we all know Google as the bad example here, but looking at it industry-wide, I'm not sure it holds. Like in a lot of cases, "you're not Google" applies and the similar incentives will not be there for a large majority of companies. Software is a cost centre for almost everyone.
