Absolutely. If it had turned out that way I would have recognized the business reasons. That said, I would have still been curious as to why the costs would be so high that it made more sense to build another version than make the purchase and reuse the results of the original effort.

Either way that didn’t end up being the issue!

Lots of fun happens there, as a common attitude will be “I’m all in favor of this as long as it doesn’t come out of *my* budget.” (I was in a meeting years back where it was recognized that the area I was in really needed newer, faster hardware to handle the increasing workload. As the SysAdmin responsible for the existing hardware, I was all in favor and pushing hard. As soon as the decision was made that the charges would be at the corporate level, my boss’s attitude magically changed from “It will cost so much money!” to “When can we do it?”. He knew as well as anyone we needed to do it. He just didn’t want the costs on *his* P&L. I managed to keep a straight face when the flip-flop occurred, but it took some doing.)

Even though divisions may belong to a common parent, each has its own P&L and a deep level of concern about things that effect it.