Okay, think about why that might have happened. Clearly they're running their servers on legacy code. What does that code do? Well, probably... everything. At this point they've been building on it for decades, and nearly everyone who was there when it started has retired or died. So they have a huge, mission-critical business platform that no one truly understands. And everyone is afraid that minor changes could have horrible, unforeseen downstream consequences, so it probably just gets edited at the margins at this point.

If you're the CTO of Cisco, what do you do there? Do you risk your job and the continued existence of the company, spending God knows how many developer hours refactoring your codebase? Or do you just deal with 8-character email addresses?