&gt; If you don&#x27;t have the talent to do the rewrite, consultants and remote developers in India are only going to make things worse.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is necessarily a given, but I see where you&#x27;re coming from with the overall perspective.<p>To get closer to the point of the post: unless there are truly solid and unavoidable blockers, e.g. substantial architectural defects that just can&#x27;t be resolved without a major rework, a rewrite of any capacity should probably be off the table.<p>Although I&#x27;m sure there are others that I have no insight into, the only &quot;successful&quot; commercial rewrite I can think of would be Windows Vista, and that only made that version of Windows somewhat releasable. Even then, that wasn&#x27;t a total reboot even of the project; it was a partial rewrite off of a different codebase with as much code salvaged from the original project as possible (the initial Longhorn builds on top of the XP codebase were a total trainwreck, driving the partial reboot on top of Server 2003&#x27;s codebase instead). They still needed two service packs to make Vista stable, and it took an entire subsequent major release (7) to right the ship, so to speak.