A little story about IT tools, and why newer isn't necessarily better:

At the last company I worked for, in the late 90s, they were using a 20-year old legacy MRP system. Unix-based, never fell over, used dumb terminals that had been around since the start of the television age.

The only reason they got rid of it was that it wasn't Y2K compliant. They replaced it with a JD Edwards system. That couldn't handle the way the company worked so JDE spent a year customising it (at great expense). The dumb terminals had to go, as JDE ran via a GUI on Windows. Also, all the hundreds of PCs in the offices, which had quite happily run the old system using terminal emulators, had to be upgraded as well, as they weren't powerful enough. Total cost of new PCs was over $1 million.

The best bit was that when I left in early 1999 the system was running like a dog, possibly requiring a network upgrade. The old system had run quite happily on the network for years.

The new system had lots of bells and whistles but I wonder if it was really worth all those millions they must have paid for the system, given that the old system was doing an adequate job (apart, obviously, from not being Y2K compliant).