Wishful thinking - the IRS is still running on COBOL; our nuclear weapons until a few years ago on Windows 95. The NYC subway still has a lot of OS/2.

Standardization does not stop bad engineering. Those who think it does have not witnessed the catastrophe a bad standard can cause. Go download and implement the Microsoft Office OOXML standard - it’s freely available, ISO approved, 6000 pages, and an abomination that not even Google claims to have correctly implemented.

You're making some points for me. You are assuming COBOL, Windows 95, or OS/2 are bad because they're old. Such assumptions are the antithesis of "engineering."

It sounds as if you're saying that these were bad things because they were always bad. And maybe they were. But we might never have any software at all if we only had good software.

I'm not saying they're bad because I don't know.

Apologies. I misread your intentions.

Old technology isn’t necessarily bad in itself. It’s well documented and understood.

Where it’s bad is when the equipment to run that software no longer is manufactured. You can’t get a new computer to run Windows 95. Not even in the military. Your only option is to virtualize, adding a huge possible failure mode that was never considered previously.

Where it’s bad is when changes are needed to adapt to modern environments, and nobody’s quite sure about what they are doing anymore. There’s no test suite, never was, the documentation is full of ancient and confusing terminology, mistakes are made.

And on and on…