[aamar]

This is an instructive error. From my perspective, there was plenty of evidence even 15 years ago that community efforts (crowd-sourcing, OSS) only win sometimes, on the relevant timeframes.

So the “higher ups” were using too coarse a heuristic or maybe had some other pretty severe error in their reasoning.

The right approach here is to do a more detailed analysis. A crude start: the community approach wins when the MVP can be built by 1-10 people and then find a market where 0.01% of the users can sufficiently maintain it.[1]

Wikipedia’s a questionable comparison point, because it’s such an extraordinary outlier success. Though a sufficiently detailed model could account for it.

1. Yochai Benkler has done much more thorough analysis of win/loss factors. See e.g. his 2006 book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks