Story

Part of the problem is that companies don't figure the ongoing hardware and software maintenance into their solutions. They develop the product until it works, ship it, and then ignore it. This leaves the products stuck at a fixed point in time while the rest of the technology world evolves at Moore's Law speed.

Take our office phone system for a simple example. Twenty years ago, our small office (20 employees) upgraded the phone system to the latest and greatest digital PBX. Many of the functions where designed to use a standard computer (a sub 100Mhz original Pentium). The computer/PBX interface was a full length ISA card, voice mail was stored on the IDE hard drive (still measured in megabytes), the call holding music was simply a mp3 playlist piped out to the audio card (an original Sound Blaster), while the whole thing ran Windows 95a and Microsoft Schedule+. Or, in other words, an archaic piece of crud that still has to function today.