To a degree I agree with you. However, with todays new technology a 'system' can live on indefinately with VM. when the old machine is becoming old you simply migrate it to a new VM machine. We still have a handful of old, smaller systems on Win2000 believe it or not. Systems that are used and maybe the vendor has gone out of business but the company still needs the function. We have a handful of systems like that. Some are not necessarily in production but have to be kept for legal reasons up and running.

With the changing of how Microsoft licenses SQL Server it is more difficult to justify an upgrade. Especially for smaller systems that don't require any of the new features like Always On. When I give my boss a quote for the cost and he asks me what do I tell our CIO the justification to upgrade... about all I can say is we will move to a newer version. That isn't much bang for the buck until we are forced to upgrade due to loss of support. We have done a lot of server consolidation but sometimes there is only so much you can do. Most of the times our hands are tied until the vendor certifies the latest version of SQL Server. Then it turns into our IT Dept putting it into the next years budget to upgrade and it not getting cut out of the budget. Then it is do we have the hours in IT for everyone to work on it. It is a never ending cycle.