> You would think that a company that has deep pockets would be in a great position to do more ground-up re-implementations. And to do so with quality, performance and correctness as the main focus.
Why is this always the go-to? The Windows 11 start menu and task bar are exactly that, from scratch re-implementations of what existed before and they are garbage. There is a lot of institutional knowledge in that old code and to pretend it holds no to little value gives us half-hearted replacements which never quite ascend to the heights they were supposed to replace.
Sure, there are some exceptions where the concept around "what the thing is" needed to change and a new product needs to re-imagine a solution (VS -> VSCode). However, I feel that we, the software development community, put way more hope that this is true way more often than it is in reality.
Well, then they are one in four. The other three were quality, performance and correctness. Simply re-implementing something, or writing something that is poor software isn't sufficient.
As for knowledge: yes, it is more valuable than the software. That does not imply the software is the only place where software is stored. In its most useful form it is stored in people. Which is why you should revisit, and rewrite, code that is important often enough to ensure the knowledge is passed on.
However, don't forget to make room for new knowledge and new ideas. That has hardly happened to Office suites for 30 years. They just tend to become "more".
Why is this always the go-to? The Windows 11 start menu and task bar are exactly that, from scratch re-implementations of what existed before and they are garbage. There is a lot of institutional knowledge in that old code and to pretend it holds no to little value gives us half-hearted replacements which never quite ascend to the heights they were supposed to replace.
Sure, there are some exceptions where the concept around "what the thing is" needed to change and a new product needs to re-imagine a solution (VS -> VSCode). However, I feel that we, the software development community, put way more hope that this is true way more often than it is in reality.