There are organisations that have been following the rewrite strategy for 2 decades that are running 5 or more parallel systems and teams all doing a lot of com

There are organisations that have been following the rewrite strategy for 2 decades that are running 5 or more parallel systems and teams all doing a lot of common things with each with unique properties often in entirely different languages and a lot of integration hell. They will quite happily be starting a 6th such project rewrite this year to solve the problem of the previous 5, this time surely it will work. Another organisation I know of replaced its "old" .net desktop client with a nice shiny Microsoft derived web solution using some customised COTs and it would solve all their maintenance issues. Sigh its a disaster as expected made all the worse because they fired the developers before the switch was even really done. Over and over this mistake is made to rewrite and replace instead of refactor on the assumption the old code is crufty rather than battle hardened and that writing new code is easier than editing old. Never do these organisations learn to develop more maintenance friendly systems along the way.