[bluedino]

> There’s probably still a lot of critical Windows enterprise software being maintained that needs consulting and support.

At my old company, it took 2 years and $2 million to re-write an application in Java. That's the cheapest project that Accenture would take.

So as long as you keep your legacy service contracts under that, you're fine. It might even be $3 million now with the new Java licensing terms.

[mrweasel]

I worked for a company, back in 2007, who had two products, one written in C++ and WxWidgets, and another written in Delphi. The Delphi product was an online publishing platform, running on IIS. They started hiring like crazy to create a new Java based platform, they must have spend millions only to scrap the whole thing a year or two in. I left just as that was happening, as did many others. Nobody wanted to go from working on the new hotness to working on the ageing Delphi platform. I think they kept it running for another five years or so, then pivoted to an online ad platform and then bankruptcy.

For online I don't think Borland, or whoever owned Delhi back then, really had the resources to keep up with everything else. Even today it's pretty expensive to buy the tooling from Embarcadero to keep projects alive, but probably cheaper and less risky that porting to another language.