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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

> It's amazing they are so profitable with 70's era technology running the business.

Without knowing any details, I would say that there are people who would argue that this attitude may be one of the reasons they are profitable. Why change a perfectly working system your customer does have no direct interaction with?

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Why use old fashioned machines with buttons (which will become muscle memory in a few months) when you can have a buggy, unresponsive and ever changing touchscreen with poor UX?

Because the new system has a sales guy who slyly bribed the right executive, and the other executives don't know why they should defend old tech.

It's obviously impossible to be profitable without using serverless javascript lambadas hosted on aws running node on docker with cassandra in a completely polyglot environment. I mean that stack pretty much prints money, unlike the 1970s technology.

> Why change a perfectly working system your customer does have no direct interaction with?

Because you can't buy replacement parts when something breaks?

Repairability is one of the defining qualities of “old stuff”

only the "old stuff" that survived. all the other "old stuff" (which is most of it) is in a landfill because it was irreparable.

Of course, as is only natural.

Why change stuff that survived?

Seems like you're making quite the leap in assuming they can't buy effective replacement parts.

I'm proposing a reason, that's all. I imagine whatever antiquated electronics they use are readily available at their scale on eBay. Like if I want a Commodore 64 for some reason, I can probably have one tomorrow. But if I need a thousand of them, that will be more difficult. Compare that to AWS, where if I need a thousand of their computers I can have them in 20 minutes.

Not to mention they've had 50yr to refine their process.

I guess tech can be overrated. Mrs B couldn't read of write but knew all the carpet prices and could give you a quote on a say 10x7 piece off the top of her head. Buffett who bought the store never used a computer at work to trade stocks or otherwise but would be the worlds richest man, more than Bezos if he hadn't given about half to charity. He can also quote most financials from memory.

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