

Ask HN: Vertical integration examples? - jorangreef

Reading about NodeJs, Ryan Dahl, the creator, had in effect kept drilling down to the metal. First he contributed to existing Ruby web servers, then wrote Ebb in C, then wrote his own HTTP parser, etc.<p>A hundred years back in time, Henry Ford in his autobiography "My Life And Work" (http://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Work-Autobiography-Henry/dp/1442144327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#38;s=books&#38;qid=1277742505&#38;sr=8-1) discussed how he achieved tremendous gains from vertical integration, eventually running his own transport ships, railroads, coal mines, lumber mills, waste plants, school, steel plants, power plants (the examples and numbers are incredible).<p>A few quick ones: Apple with their tight integration of industrial design and expert knowledge of materials. Google with GFS and Chrome OS. SpaceX with in-house production of just about everything to achieve cost reductions across a broad spectrum of components. It's positive NIH.<p>Where else can examples of vertical integration be seen?
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TeX is an almost absurd case of it, though closer to the NodeJS example than
to vertical integration in business. Knuth wanted a computer-typesetting
system for a book he was writing, so he wrote one. That typesetting system
needed a way of encoding scalable fonts, so he wrote one (Metafont). That font
system needed fonts, so he designed one (Computer Modern). Then he needed an
auto-hyphenation algorithm, so he invented one. Etc. Eventually he got around
to writing a book using it.

There are of course a lot of bad cases as well. Google pulls off something
like GFS, but there are dozens of companies with half-assed, bug-ridden
internal reimplementations of custom components where they might have been
better off using something more standard. Even where the in-house stuff is
decent, it often adds maintenance/upgrade costs (want to upgrade your Linux
server? oops, gotta port the in-house kernel modules first).

