About that migration scenario

That I laid out here. I got a comment that said, more or less: "1000 man years? No one does projects like that anymore!" Maybe they don't. However, there are plenty of projects like that dating from the early and mid (even late) 90's - a number of our Cincom Smalltalk customers have such large projects. How do I reach a number like that? Well, I have personal experience with one huge effort at a large (Fortune 100) firm. They have had 150-300 people developing the applications in question since late 1993 or early 1994. That's well over a thousand man years in at this point. It's hardly the only example of such a system either - I have friends on many other similar systems, and not a few of them have tried migrations to Java (watch for it - some will now try to go to .NET). Most of the efforts I know of failed; the ones that succeeded merely re-delivered the existing functionality in the (now trendy) language. The question remains - Where's the business value?