That's rather the flaw though, isn't it.
It's the darwinism of companies. At the board level, year after year it's not in the board's interest to spend on big capital projects to replace "working" core plant.
Until they're so out of date that you can't compete with younger companies with more ambition and less desire to "protect shareholder value" by spending as little money as possible.
Then, the shareholders lose their shareholder value when the companies go bust. The eventual product kept Fred Dibner in work for years.
There's an analogue with today. All those thousands of lines of COBOL, hacked again and again rather than spend the money on migrating to a more flexible hardware platform and a programming language people under 50 know how to use.
Eventually, I'll either fail massively, with all inherent "reputational risk" or the world will change so far away from how it worked in 1979, until smaller, more dynamic companies will no them.
Unless you're a bank, in which case 1960s nationisation kicks in.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
