Sometimes companies maintain high friction/high cost crap like that to scare off acquisition.

A friend worked for a regional bank that had a strategy of purposeful obsolescence to maintain control with the core shareholders, who were mostly from one family. They were using 1980s era AS/400 systems with terminals as late as 2008, and had only 1 PC assigned to a manager in the branches, with connectivity via ISDN.

I hadn't thought of this to be honest, but I do faintly remember the IT / Dev team using the "not technically feasible" line a bunch whenever Marketing would come through with stuff. Used to get me angry quite a bit and I saw it translate a bunch to lost revenue and increased costs.

I don't know how much of this got sent out of Marsh and up to Sun though.

Lazy IT people are always a good excuse too. Especially in CFO driven IT shops.

I've seen people waste millions on magical systems that did very little out of inertia. In one case, a system with something $10M in annual costs that managed terminal (as in VT-102 terminal) and line printer assignments. A decade after the printers were trashed and terminals moved to a (almost equally offensive) very expensive web-based system.

I saw this a bunch in my next job after Marsh, which was analytics consulting. I'm not sure about Marsh doing this (at least internally), but who knows with Sun.