>Or is craftsmanship a different thing from longevity anyway?

To me, craftsmanship is creating a good product - taking pride in your work. A well crafted product should have a trouble-free lifespan, even if that lifespan is short. Longevity is just a measure of how long something can be kept functioning, knowing that the cost of maintenance will rise over time. Reliability is probably a close cousin to craftsmanship.

I think craftsmanship gets short shrift, because almost anything in IT today will be obsolete sooner than the designers expect. Also, my needs (or wants) will change over time. Something well crafted and reliable, with many years of functioning life left, can get tossed.

Then there's that P-166 in the corner, doing that one task well...

Anything built right in IT is NOT built to last.
To create an IT product that lasts 100 years would involve more time and money than than one built to last, say 10 - and a 10 year old IT product is pretty much useless. IT products of 10 years from now will have unpredicable requirements, trying to build that in ahead of time is a fools game.
A chair is always a chair, but in the digital world nothing is that stable.

Longevity in IT software? I can't explain why we as consumers, users and company buyers of technolgy products continually purchase the new version of what we already own, when the previous version we have works exactly 98% fine for doing the work that needs to be done.

How many times have we purchased a new version of Micrsoft Word (or Office), despite the fact that when we create a new note or document all of the most often used features involve the capability found in the first versions.

(for example Word 2.0 has the Font Size, Center, Bold Face, Underline, Spelling Check, page Size etc features I use every day in my new but not the latest Office XP version.)

There are so many features, in the new versions that we are even dumbed into using the Short Menus so we don't see all of our choices, we've paid for.

I call it, Neighbors got a new car, I want one to envy... Good Craftmanship, is the key and price of admission to products that have longevity.. Now if it could just stop my envy for that Fancy Car I saw driving around the corner..

"Built to Last" as a concept in IT?

That won't happen until we have a stable, robust infrastructure on which to build. That will likely never happen. My home is 17 years old, and is 100% useful, and essentially indistinguishible from new. My girlfriend's home is 80 years old, and, while it certainly looks a bit different than current houses, is still 100% useful and usable.

Can the same be said for a ten year old PC or server, or operating system?

I'm not a "Trekie", but whenever I do watch some version of Star Trek, and they have one of those situations where they come across another vessel, and take control of that other ship's computer systems and logs (especially when it's 200 year old vessel or something), I have all I can do to not laugh out loud! Talk about compatibility issues!