[RogerL]

My bad, I brought up 'start up', but that was not the point of my comment. Big as in Excel? Well, we have OpenOffice, Google Docs, and so on. They were written from scratch with the aim to compete with Excel/Office.

As for the victim of their own success, I addressed that, arguing that it is often inertia and silliness, as we accept different feature sets when we switch our tools out.

The reality is, we rewrite all the time. I used to develop in Borland and OWL. I moved apps into MFC and Visual Studio. Now stuff is being moved into Qt. People have switched from native to cloud, and so on. We endlessly move to new platforms, new software, and so on. In all those cases we accept that the feature set will be different, yet for some reason we don't accept it when we are rewriting an app. I'm not dismissing the cost - if you need to generate a TSP report, and I don't offer that feature, then you are pulling out Python or something to hack it together yourself, and that has to be counted as part of the cost of the project.

We do rewrite large infrastructure software. We do. All the time.