[lumost]

In maturing parts of the software industry you'll often see a desire to stay with the times in order to maintain a competitive edge, re-inventing the wheel often looks like full/partial re-writes of a system for minor marginal gains.

A great example of this is the evolution of FB/Google/Amazon. Portions of their core tech have been completely re-written over the years for marginal gain, but there is a large premium to being the best in tech.

In other parts of the industry every new cycle enables some new area of tech, and those marginal gains become the minimum bar for entry. e.g. Deep Learning and Computer Vision, distributed systems and cloud computing/SaaS.

[hopler]

You overestimate the quality and reliability and expandability of those old systems. The 1998 10 Blue Links tech couldn't support the functionality and scale of Google today.