In the spring of 1998, Netscape launched Open Source with the Mozilla project. Six months later, under pressure from Web standards advocates and others, Netscape and Mozilla tossed the Netscape Communicator 5.x beta code base and started over, a re-write based on a nascent engine that would come to be called Gecko.
That re-write did indeed take much longer than expected as Netscape wasn't able to release Netscape 6 for about two full years which was an awful long time to be without a web browser release.
And Netscape 6 wasn't terribly successful except that a few of us took that code in 2002 and turned it into Firefox which shipped in 2004 and quickly grew to hundreds of millions of users and a half a billion dollar a year business that's maintained at those levels of revenue for more than a decade.
So, re-writes can work, just not necessarily the way one might expect them to work.
In the spring of 1998, Netscape launched Open Source with the Mozilla project. Six months later, under pressure from Web standards advocates and others, Netscape and Mozilla tossed the Netscape Communicator 5.x beta code base and started over, a re-write based on a nascent engine that would come to be called Gecko.
That re-write did indeed take much longer than expected as Netscape wasn't able to release Netscape 6 for about two full years which was an awful long time to be without a web browser release.
And Netscape 6 wasn't terribly successful except that a few of us took that code in 2002 and turned it into Firefox which shipped in 2004 and quickly grew to hundreds of millions of users and a half a billion dollar a year business that's maintained at those levels of revenue for more than a decade.
So, re-writes can work, just not necessarily the way one might expect them to work.