Why fix what isnt broken quote

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Share if it ain't broke, don't fix it Post the Definition of if it ain't broke, don't fix it to Facebook Share the Definition of if it ain't broke, don't fix it on Twitter. But keeping around End-of-Life system software and aging computer systems in general?

I'm not sure even Bertram Lance would agree with that one. Bert died in August of at the age of 82, but had it been explained to him that his widely-used quote has been used as justification for potentially exposing government, businesses and individuals to malware that could result in financial damages and leaks of Personally Identifying Information PII , he'd probably ask that it be stricken.

During my 20 years as an IT industry consultant as both a freelancer and also during my tenure as a systems architect at IBM and Unisys I encountered countless examples of putting off upgrades of clunky old stuff because it was inconvenient or nobody wanted to spend the money. Many of those things turned out to be single points of failure that held up large migrations and application modernization efforts, and ended up causing delays that were considerably more expensive than the money that the organization thought they would be saving by putting upgrades off.

Or the the Internet Service Provider whose provisioning and billing system was tied to home-grown scripts and off-the-shelf software written for an EOL version of SunOS on an ancient SPARC 10 that was left running for over a decade, only to discover that when the hardware failed, the backup of the script code and the orphaned off-the-shelf software they had would not run on a modernized UNIX OS so easily. Or the public transit authority of a large city which had a year-old mainframe still in service that operated the switching system for its train cars that needed code modifications when alterations to the train lines were made.

They actually had to pull someone out of retirement that wrote the original program, because the system wasn't supported anymore by the original vendor and nobody on staff there had those skill sets anymore. I could go on with dozens of examples of systems that weren't "broken" but were left in place, and the consequences that followed.

But sometimes IT gets the cluetrain because the consequences of avoiding remediation of a problem are so dire that any inaction could risk a catastrophic business continuity loss. If prolonged, such a loss or a data exposure could undermine your company's reputation and result in loss of customer confidence or even cause you to be fined heavily by the government.

Not to mention other damages by the downtime alone. The last time the industry hopped on the cluetrain was the Year problem. Windows XP's End of Life has been compared to the Y2K event because of the cavalier attitude many end-users as well as businesses have about it. Just yesterday, a follower of mine on Twitter remarked that Y2K was "overblown. I take great offense to that, because I and countless IT professionals worked full time for several years in the remediation of software and systems in anticipation of that event.

Even in the days of newsprint, 50 years is hard to swallow. Here is an barchart of the hits that a search for 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' finds in an very large archive of 20th century newspapers:. I would suggest that the notion and possibly a variant of the phrase may well have been around for some time before the s, but that the present-day wording of the phrase began then. George Bernard Shaw's 'two countries divided by a common language' comes into play here.

The phrase has to be American.