Thankfully my company has made a huge push into updating the old stuff over the past 10 years or so. It’s got a long way to go, as there is debt in many areas, but what we have addressed so far is infinitely better in function, user experience and satisfaction, and reduced downtime. It does come with its own financial costs, but sooner or later there’s going to be no one around that knows that tech, and an ever shrinking hardware pool.

Running something on a cobbled together infrastructure can work for a while, but usually when it fails, it does so catastrophically, and there is little recourse but to immediately spend large sums for emergency parts and fixes, rather than spread that cost over time as just standard maintenance expenses.

It’s like driving your car until the engine blows up because you were mad about how much oil changes cost. Sure, you saved $50 per change, but then you blew it all on a $10k engine, so what did you actually save? Nothing! And you probably paid more than if you had just lifecycled it in the first place. It’s amazingly short-sighted.