As an example of this, I was at a large government department that was in the middle of a mainframe operating system upgrade project. Not the hardware! The applications were also largely staying as-is. Their budget was two billion dollars, which just blew my mind.

I was chatting with a member of the small army of project managers involved, and I was trying to explain to him that for that kind of money I'll build them a whole new mainframe from sand. Silicon, circuitry, operating system, applications, everything.

For two billion dollars you could literally afford to build a dedicated foundry just to stamp out the sheetmetal for the case and still have 1.9 billion left over for everything else.