to me, the rising stock price is also difficult to fathom. I suppose it is easy to underestimate just how many legacy systems there are. 40 year old, nation-sta

to me, the rising stock price is also difficult to fathom. I suppose it is easy to underestimate just how many legacy systems there are. 40 year old, nation-state scale projects that are used by bureaucrats and built by badly aligned contractors who get their specs/requirements from non-technical committees. Switching costs are prohibitive and the more complex is a system is, the more hours can be billed. A friend of mine works in IT in one of the largest banks in the world and he half-jokingly says that they only have two requirements for buying software: 1. it must be expensive 2. it shouldn't really work The success of Oracle and others is built on "90% of software engineering is maintenance" With a paradigm shift from on-premise, Desktop to mobile-cloud the old oligopoly is finally under attack.