[ericlevine]

While that certainly does seem appealing, zombie projects can have serious impact elsewhere in the company. For instance, if a security bug is found in some piece of common infrastructure, you'll have to pull the update and deploy the new code. Seems simple, but in the months or years since the last deploy, many other pieces of infrastructure have changed and now you have to integrate, test and safely deploy a product for which nobody is familiar.

This is not just speculation, either. The project I worked on at Google had to deal with such zombie products all the time, and they were a HUGE drain on productivity for us.

[rachelbythebay]

There's also the whole problem where there is no love for maintenance work, and you have to create massive new systems to get anywhere. This biases things towards creation, deployment, and then flying the coop. The zombie projects which follow are inevitable.

The whole thing about "the one which is deprecated and the one which isn't ready yet" is rooted in reality.