I'd upvote this many time if I could. I am in the same boat--my team helps maintain a ten year old web application that is used by the largest companies in our domain. The application is literally the backbone of data used by these companies to make money. We have reliability issues, and sometimes clients get a little upset, but every year it is the same thing: how much do we need to budget for support?
> Rarely. Mostly they care about meeting quarterly goals and budgets; and ease of finding inexpensive, more-or-less competent talent. In both of these, PHP excels.
This. In my previous job, I was literally told by my boss, that they'd consider switching from PHP to something like Ruby or whatever, but PHP programmers are cheaper so that's why they stick with it.
Rarely. Mostly they care about meeting quarterly goals and budgets; and ease of finding inexpensive, more-or-less competent talent. In both of these, PHP excels.
I'm currently maintaining an app stack for a Fortune-100 company that, if I told you what it was, you simply wouldn't believe I was telling the truth. That's how out of date it is. "Scalability, performance, technical debt and quality" never entered into it. All anyone ever cared about was "does it get the job done and what does it cost to keep it running for another year as-is?"