Realistically, if, say, one of these big corps/banks with deeply-integrated COBOL systems spent a few years revamping their systems to something more modern and usable today, how much would it cost?
Running mainframes isn't cheap. COBOL programmers aren't cheap. Not being able to improve these systems / innovate with them can cost the business a lot of time/money. And if we're talking COBOL, we're talking at least 25 year old corps.
How long's the ROI on moving over? How expensive does the maintenance of antiquated systems get? It's easy to say that they're rock-solid and never need to be touched, but is that really true? For example, lot of banks today have a lot of absurd UX, often because of absurd internals and I know a lot of that usually is "the system is ancient and nobody really touches it anymore, that's just what it is now".
Running mainframes isn't cheap. COBOL programmers aren't cheap. Not being able to improve these systems / innovate with them can cost the business a lot of time/money. And if we're talking COBOL, we're talking at least 25 year old corps.
How long's the ROI on moving over? How expensive does the maintenance of antiquated systems get? It's easy to say that they're rock-solid and never need to be touched, but is that really true? For example, lot of banks today have a lot of absurd UX, often because of absurd internals and I know a lot of that usually is "the system is ancient and nobody really touches it anymore, that's just what it is now".