[explaingarlic]

It's good to note that it depends largely on the company you're looking at.

I work for a very large organization (~£6bil in revenue, £700mil in profit last year) and we suffer from the "mud" problem - nothing about our technology stack is particularly special, it's just a hodgepodge of many different technologies that struggle to work together. That's not entirely fair - I work within a very unique solution inside of this firm, but I'm in a very unique position and I'm sad to say that it took a silly amount of hard work just to be able to not work on legacy applications.

That being said, the companies you mention (Netflix, Github) work completely differently - they were designed with tech in mind! They probably are much more lean in a technological sense, and don't suffer from enterprise architectural issues that large legacy firms do.

I suspect that this inability to move has singlehandedly killed more than one company, though I haven't studied the market to the point that I could really name any. The real kudos has to be given to large companies that existed before the internet and were able to move away from their slow-to-adapt, horribly inefficient legacy systems.

[eashman]

I often point out an anecdote from my early e-commerce days in the late 90s where a customer wanted in-store pickup like everyone else they saw on the web doing. But they just had purchased an already outdated (but IBM so nobody got fired) Point Of Sale system for 40 stores which did inventory management as a batch at the close of business each day over Frame Relay lines or even dialup. The concept of a VPN was alien to them.

Since they were selling some limited edition high priced items that were allocated to each store, there were often only 1 or 2 at a given location of what would be a popular item.

So you can imagine when I explained that the huge investment in the legacy system just a few years before was a big blocker for ‘pick up in store’.

I think we had to hardcode something that would remove an item for sale online if there were less than 2 left or some awful hack like that to reduce customer complaints.