I don’t disagree with anything you say, and largely it’s down to semantics. Let me share with you some of my thoughts on your response:

“However: Products are bought by customers. Customers are the people with money. They are willing to spend money for certain quality.

External products are bought by external customers; that’s the customers of a company. Customers and company have a natural and direct relationship. Products are delivered to customers, money is paid to company.”

I don’t pay anything to publish articles on Medium, and you do not have to pay anything to read my articles. The costs of developing and running Medium are subsidised, and there are many approaches to financing a product.

I would argue here, the interesting discussion is understanding which models apply to internal vs external products.

Internal customers just have requirements and want to get high quality products — but they don’t pay for it. Payment is highly indirect.

Sometimes internal customers do have to pay and I have a situation like this currently. Building a platform, if we don’t charge our internal customers, our team will just absorb the costs of running their products. More importantly, the business will have no transparency about how much it costs to support our external products if the platform is not transparent about how much it costs to service internal customers.

And on top of that: there is no internal market.

No there usually isn’t and that introduces a very interesting and often political dynamic. If your internal product does not offer the same capabilities as existing external products, there will be huge resistance to using your internal product and potential internal customers may fight hard not to use it.

If the organisation mandates that all internal teams use your internal product, now there is no competition. This could be extremely productive in the long-term or could result in catastrophic consequences if the internal teams are not applying modern product management best practices.