[ajscherer]

As sick of paying a premium for antiquated goods as businesses may be, they aren't going to make a decision that has costs far in excess of it's benefits.

The benefit of abandoning COBOL is greatly increased programmer productivity. The cost of abandoning COBOL is completely rebuilding your system from scratch.

I could go on for days about why it's dumb for an organization to undertake a massive project for which it is horribly ill-equipped in order to replace something that works. Instead I'll just note that I used to work (not as a programmer) at an organization that tried this. They ended up spending 8 figures for nothing more than the realization that they should hire more COBOL programmers.

I agree that the percentage has dropped (due to organizations that use COBOL dying and new ones avoiding it for obvious reasons), but I doubt it has dropped that much.