I was thinking the other day about the tendency toward specialization and the benefits and drawbacks of this. I've seen it in companies I've worked for and in everyday life the tendency toward centralizing specialists. Database as a service is an example, companies don't manage their own databases they pay another company to manage them.
This has it's benefits to be sure. A company that specializes in database as a service, such as MongoDB, can certainly do a much better job keeping things running. They can focus on delivering the best experience, keeping the lights on and pushing forward with new improvements. This also has downsides since an outage will effect many companies and those companies do not necessarily have control over that outage. When something goes wrong there is often not much that can be done other than wait for the provider to restore their service.
The question comes down to this in my mind, "should a company focus on best in class in one thing or diversity?". I'm not sure where the balance is between diversity and specialization, but it's something that I have been pondering.
