At YAPC Europe this year, dami gave an interesting talk about migrating from COBOL to Perl.
He highlighted something that I'd not heard clearly enunciated before:
One might believe that replacing an existing program (implied legacy, ugly, hard to use) with a a webapp (implied modern, attractive, easier to use), but actually this might not be progress, because webapps can necessitate more people to get the same amount of work done. The actions they can require, such as dragging and closing windows are often actually slower than the keyboard driven apps they replace.
He added we were careful not to do that.
Obvious it may be, but it's worth remembering.
