- Why would a company go to all the effort of porting a program when the current version still works fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
- The port would have to be debugged and field-tested in parallel with the existing system. The existing system is probably ten years old. All its quirks are well-understood. It survived that time in 1998 when there was a supply chain breakdown and when production finally got back online, they had to run at triple capacity for a month to catch up. The new system hasn’t been stress-tested. Who knows whether it will handle these emergencies as well as the last system.
- Converting it from a DOS program to a Windows program would incur massive retraining costs for its employees (“I have always used F4 to submit a purchase order. Now I have this toolbar with a bunch of strange pictures, and I have to learn what they all mean.” Imagine if somebody took away your current editor and gave you a new one with different keybindings. “But the new one is better.”)
- Often the companies don’t have the source code to the programs any more, so they couldn’t port it if they wanted to. It may use a third-party VB control from a company that has since gone out of business. It may use a custom piece of hardware that they have only 16-bit drivers for. And even if they did have the source code, the author of the program may no longer work at the company. In the case of a missing driver, there may be nobody at the company qualified to write a 32-bit Windows driver. (I know one company that used foot-pedals to control their software.)
Perhaps with a big enough carrot, these companies could be convinced to undertake the effort (and risk!) of porting (or in the case of lost source code and/or expertise, rewriting from scratch) their LOB applications. But it’ll have to be a really big carrot. Real example: Just this past weekend I was visiting a friend who lived in a very nice, professionally-managed apartment complex. We had occasion to go to the office, and I caught a glimpse of their computer screen. The operating system was Windows XP. And the program they were running to do their apartment management? It was running in a DOS box.
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