...Who refuse to upgrade software configuration tools used to program their hardware?
I work in the fire protection business. Fire alarm panels require special software to configure them for the specific needs of your building. The need to be tweaked periodically as the building is renovated, etc. so its not a one shot deal for the configuration.
Once a panel is released, unless there are glaring functionality problems, the software never gets maintained beyond a v1.0. In a vast number of cases, the custom software is OS dependent. So when the world moves from 98 to xp, xp to 7, etc. it actually breaks the programming software. The vendors take a honey badger approach and refuse to spend money developing new versions to keep up with the new OSes.
The vendor's suggestion? "Sell them a new panel!" Right. So because you are lazy and refuse to maintain your software (or for that matter make it so that its not OS dependent) you expect us to tell the customer "Yes we know the $100,000 solid state system you invested in 7 years ago works flawlessly, but we cant program it properly with our new equipment since we upgraded to the latest version of windows. You need to spend another 100K. We are flatly told "I dont care about your computers, my system works fine. Find a way to program my existing system or I'll find somebody who CAN!"
I have guys who have to lug around up to 3 or 4 laptops of varying age in their trucks because we have 10-20+ year old panels which work great and are mechanically sound, but the software to program it only run in the version of the OS that was current at the time it was released! (we even have a few that are DOS based)