InfoWorld's Off the Record column continues to supply great tales of the software world's mis-steps, like this one:
“Ten years ago, I was the IT manager at a successful software company whose main product was aimed at large insurance companies. It was a DOS app that read records from large data files, did a little processing, and passed the results to other apps downstream. It wasn't particularly pretty, but it was accurate — and it was fast! It worked in batch mode, processing thousands of records per minute, which was a critical feature, considering how many records our clients needed to manage each day.”
“We were doing well with this app, which was pretty much the industry leader. So in a classic it-ain't-broke-so-let's-fix-it-anyway move, some of our managers and salespeople began complaining that it wasn't written for Windows.”
Betcha can't guess what comes next. Read the whole story here.