[adrianN]

Yes, there are plenty of businesses which would never put their data on someone else's servers.

Also, you should never underestimate corporate inertia. Switching to a new system is immensely expensive, for many companies it won't happen, ever. Just look how many companies are still using decade old hardware and scour ebay for replacement 286 processors.

[Karunamon]

How much of that immense expense is due to various factors that can be summed up as "obstinance", and how much is due to actual, practical, tangible factors?

I'm not being snarky - I've seen many a large business make many a horrible decision, not due to a dispassionate evaluation of the pros and cons of each option, but because the people in charge hate change. And it's not that said change would be necessarily painful or demonstrably bad, it's an irrational bias.

Change hate appears to scale linearly with organizational size, more specifically, number of managerial staff.

[mkozlows]

This isn't an argument against them being the "walking dead."

If nobody was using them anymore, they'd just be the dead-dead. The "walking" part comes from their existing support base propping them up.

"Oracle and EMC are fine, just like 286s!" is not an argument that would comfort an executive at those companies.