Oh, I'm totally aware of technical debt, etc. I have worked on both maintaining and rewriting a number of such enterprise apps myself. It is just in this case,

Oh, I'm totally aware of technical debt, etc. I have worked on both maintaining and rewriting a number of such enterprise apps myself. It is just in this case, if the revenue WAS ever at risk (don't forget we are talking billions here), then you would need to be a bungling idiot to not fix the issue at hand before embarking on a rewrite. Personally, I think the article is a dramatisation - I would certainly be too embarrassed to write such a thing if it were true.