Articulating an answer to “buy why not?” is usually just an exercise you perform for the benefit of juniors, outsiders, marketers, evangelists and people who happened to be used to that tool already. - HN / Brendan Gregg’s Blog

Working for a famous tech company, I get asked a lot “Why don’t you use technology X?” X may be an application, programming language, operating system, hypervisor, processor, or tool. It may be because:

• It performs poorly.
• It is too expensive.
• It is not open source.
• It lacks features.
• It lacks a community.
• It lacks debug tools.
• It has serious bugs.
• It is poorly documented.
• It lacks timely security fixes.
• It lacks subject matter expertise.
• It’s developed for the wrong audience.
• Our custom internal solution is good enough.
• Its longevity is uncertain: Its startup may be dead or sold soon.
• We know under NDA of a better solution.
• We know other bad things under NDA.
• Key contributors told us it was doomed.
• It made sense a decade ago but doesn’t today.
• It made false claims in articles/blogs/talks and has lost credibility.
• It tolerates brilliant jerks and has no effective CoC.
• Our lawyers won’t accept its T&Cs or license.

It’s rarely because we don’t know about it or don’t understand it. Sometimes we do know about it, but have yet to find time to check it out. For big technical choices, it is often the result of an internal evaluation that involved various teams, and for some combination of the above reasons. Companies typically do not share these internal product evaluations publicly.