[kourt]

bad code forever because your technical team get annoyed and leave

And the effects of technical debt and bad code will eventually result in slow iteration and poor product quality which will eventually become visible to customers.

[voidlogic]

This x1000. I think that OPs sentence above was the only off part of their assessment, most was spot on.

When I was a consultant integrating niche specific 3rd party apps, where even the "major vendor" was often a pretty small operation. It was not uncommon to see this happen.

Slow releases, years of minor updates, with "the big update" always on the horizon. Inability to come out with a 64-bit version, etc. All very common and signs of poor project management, technical debt, or most likely, both.

Sometimes we would be resolving issues with their "support engineers" only to realize they had like 2 developers (one of which we were talking to) and a whole team of sales guys.