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by piratebroadcast 3444 days ago
I did work on a project that was Rails 3, and for various reasons, it can never be upgraded without basically rebuilding the entire system. They keep hoping for an exit that will simply never happen because who would buy a rotting system like that? I think myself and only a few other devs there understood the situation. Its not like sales or the CEO fully understood.
2 comments

You'd be surprised, most of the time for consumer apps the value isn't in the tech anyways.
This is true: the firm I work for at the moment just completed buying an incredibly expensive Fortran-based platform. That's despite the fact it cannot integrate with our existing products without serious work, nobody knows Fortran here, and the original developer sold it so he could retire.

So even though it makes no technical sense it bolsters a gap in the product offering, and they'll have to find consultants to limp it along every time they need something small done that would otherwise be very cheap. It's all about the balancing act.

People buy businesses for the business.... not the software.