Comment by lamasery

Plenty of businesses or products within businesses stagnate and fail because their software got too expensive to maintain and extend. Not infrequently, this happens before it even sees a public release. Any business that can't draw startup-type levels of investment to throw effectively infinite amounts of Other People's Money at those kinds of problems, risks that end if they allow their software to get too messed-up.

The "who gives a shit, we'll just rewrite it at 100x the cost" approach to quality is very particular to the software startup business model, and doesn't work elsewhere.