> There are really only two major players who have awful legacy software. We spent $300k last year to aquire a single seat on a piece of software. We spent another $200k on 2 seats for a year of another piece of software.

What? There many more than two major players and every large contractor has written their own internal processing software. The best tools in their packages are reserved for internal use only, just as the majors did decades ago when the majors operated their own acquisition crews and had in-house processing staff.

Multi-nationals would do turkey-shoots to put new data in the hands of multiple contractors and let them have at it with their best processors and tools partly to see if processing shops had developed better tools but also to target talented processors for their own operations. It's pretty cut-throat out there.

If your company spent $300k on a single seat I would love to know what software they licensed. As an independent contractor for a couple of decades I have been able to license top software packages from top-line processing software companies for under $100k per seat. After you buy that seat you are only paying maintenance in successive years so your costs usually drop to around 20% of the cost of a new license. It covers patches and maintenance and entitles you to new versions on upgrade as long as you are current on your license. You can get a second-tier package for less than $60k + 20% annual maintenance. Some brand new packages I evaluated in the last 5 years debuted below $40k for a package that was full-featured and ready to go from field tapes to final deliverables. Your people must not do any evaluation at all.

The seismic software field is constantly changing.

>These applications are total garbage too.

Haha. I have seen a lot of this in my time in the industry. One thing that chaps most of our asses is that the larger software companies are tuned to the needs of those who hold the most software licenses so small shops are frequently ignored if they request new features, bug fixes, etc. in favor of the software provider adding some new whiz-bang feature for a large license holder.

A lot of the software packages available share the same roots. Several packages that I have personally evaluated are derived from one single public code base with the only real difference being their GUI. One may be more user-friendly, another sucks to have to deal with it but it has all the tools plus some custom gizmorithms, a third is almost a clone of the first but leaves out modules most useful for land or marine data and doesn't allow VSP processing.

I know they are the same code base because I cornered the developers when I noticed errors common to all of them. I had documented a persistent bug (hey, now it's a feature!) in their software while also evaluating other provider's software and in the process found two other packages that would produce the exact same output every time given identical input even though the output was clearly wrong. In one of the packages, even the parameterization screen dialogs were nearly identical. Pretty unimaginative GUI coders for some of this stuff but it is likely because the guys slapping the interface on this kludge don't actually understand the objectives behind what we are doing, they don't understand which bits of information make or break the imaging effort, etc. because they are coders and not geophysicists.

But, overall, large contractors employ some of the brightest minds in geophysics, computer science, physics, mathematics, geology, etc. That is the main reason that we are able to squeeze old data to extract even more geology than we initially could when it was acquired. Algorithms have improved, hardware is up to the task of keeping everything straight as it gets hammered through the flows.