I wish this were the case, but it is not. I perform high-level
technology consulting. In my experience, big corporations are spending
millions if not billions to have their old hardware and software patched
and kludged around the problem. In most cases, the cost of "fixing" the
old software is much higher than rebuilding the entire system from
scratch, with new software on new hardware. But, it is too scary for
management to abandon their old systems and/or commit to entirely new
systems. Thus, they rather spend more money. I do not believe they
really understand the complexity and costs of keeping their own systems.
My experience is that it is much easier to do build something correctly
from scratch than to try to add pieces onto a poorly designed system to
make it outperform its intended design.
-- Harvey Newstrom (harv@gate.net)