[cutler]

Do you find any of these legacy system clients are open to having their system upgraded to a modern version of the same or related language, eg. .Net for ASP? After all, it wouldn't involve a significant change in the business logic and most esablished languages are more or less backwards compatible.

[djbusby]

I hear that. I want that. But, mostly what I see is that at least once before a vendor shit the bed on a rewrite in $ModernX and then the business play became "nurse it".

And, having been through many rewrites myself, I frequently surprised they could hose the deal. It feels like scope-creep is the killer but I only have feelings for the data, no metrics.