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> There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary > There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningful

• wait_a_minute 3y ago
  Absolutely. Maintaining and modernizing code means making use of the newest capabilities so your systems are more efficient, thereby reducing their costs. Newer tech also has many more capabilities which means older products can become new again, which would lead to more sales. It also reduces the bus factor since you will be able to find many more experienced people to intervene in your system if it experiences significant issues. I recently worked on a platform that still used Silverlight well after its deprecation. They needed to deprecate and then extricate that dependency. For a very long time, people would pursue features over this maintenance task since the maintenance wouldn't have increased revenue. However, eventually the very old dependency slowed down their ability to produce features that customers want and presented a security risk as well. These certainly will reduce profit margin...so a lot of the time, tech investment will be about not losing the profit margin that already exists, and biding time until new capabilities become available to add new features and decrease system costs.