The bespoke line-of-business application is a common feature of the corporate world, and a thing that has been instrumental in cementing Windows as the corporate desktop OS standard. These applications—I’ve worked on a few myself—are typically crummy affairs. The foundation of such applications is typically some combination of Visual Basic 6 and obsolete versions of Access and Excel. On top of this mound of [redacted], these apps usually contain one or more third-party components to draw graphs or something, from vendors that have long since gone out of business.
These applications often grow organically (though you should be thinking "mold" or "bacterial infection" rather than "rose" or "kitten") over a period of years, acting as a time-capsule of sorts—if you want to know how software was written in 1993, there is no better place to look than the bespoke line-of-business application—and they have a tendency to outlast their creators. The result is that many of these programs are unmaintained, with no one entirely sure how they work or how it is that they do whatever it is that they do. But one thing is common to all: they’re all essential to the continued operation of the business. If the app won’t run, the business won’t run either.
Link – http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/reviews/2010/01/windows-xp-mode.ars/
