They aren't reliable. Anyone who remembers floppy disks will remember how easily damaged they were, and that was back when the equipment was new. So for "reliab

They aren't reliable. Anyone who remembers floppy disks will remember how easily damaged they were, and that was back when the equipment was new. So for "reliable" read "avoids career risk". Outside of the tech industry IT projects fail a lot, and they fail in ways that non-technical people do not/cannot/will not try to understand. From the perspective of your average middle ranking executive or civil servant any project involving computers is very likely to just randomly end up delivering nothing despite consuming tens of millions of dollars/euros. The phenomenon is utterly baffling to them and feels hopeless. Combine it with a rolling heads culture in which the organizational response to failure is firing / sidelining someone in order to show accountability (vs a rigorous post-mortem analysis), and you get a lot of organizational weirdness that boils down to everyone scrambling away from anything that involves technology modernization. At some level the reason we have such a thing as a "tech company" or "startup" is because these are what we call organizations that aren't intimidated by software projects. Government organizations are especially prone to ending up on obsolete 1980s/90s era tech because there's no market pressure or bonuses incentivizing them to improve things, because awareness of how often IT projects fail is much higher now than it was back then, and because civil servants are typically very focused on staying inside the civil service and making it to pensionable age. The bulk of their comp is weighted towards the end of their lives due to way more generous pensions than in the private sector so this gives them all an incentive to avoid any project that might have a concrete failure mode.