I think at least one part of the author's argument bears examining: the author says, "The cold reality that software companies try to ignore is that ANY major

I think at least one part of the author's argument bears examining: the author says, "The cold reality that software companies try to ignore is that ANY major piece of software needs to be rewritten from the ground up eventually." He makes a good case for it, yet Joel Spolsky has this to say: "... the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch." ... "There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong." Link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html How do you square the two observations? I think that since you can't reasonably go down both roads with the same project at the same time, one doesn't really compare the results of one option to the real results of the other, but rather to the imagined result we would have gotten if we taken the other road. In short, neither rewriting nor endlessly patching is going to produce results as good as we think we ought to have; both would be a major pain in the butt. The devils always lie in the details, details you won't hit until you try one or the other. I'm inclined to think Spolsky is closer to the truth, but I'm suggesting it's not as clear cut as either position would have you believe. The other point of the O'Reilly article, however, is spot on: "most companies let the value walk out the door (either through layoffs or attrition)"