Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)

by Marianne Bellotti

Like pottery sherds, old computer programs are artifacts of human thought. There’s so much you can tell about an organization’s past by looking at its code.

Legacy modernizations are hard not because they are technically hard—the problems and the solutions are usually well understood—it’s the people side of the modernization effort that is hard.

We abandon patterns only to reinvent them later and sell them as completely new.

Economists have a different explanation for adoption rates of new technology. They typically describe it as the contrast between alignable and nonalignable differences. Alignable differences are those for which the consumer has a reference point. For example, this car is faster than that car, or this phone has a better camera than that phone. Nonalignable differences are characteristics that are wholly unique and innovative; there are no reference points with which to compare.