Good list but curious why you advise against doing conferences and conventions. The obvious benefit in my mind is advertising, potential clients, and most importantly, advertisable "credibility" on your website in the form of "Speaker at X conf".
I'm not in the consulting business, however, and the list of benefits is speculative.
While that's true, the execs who make these decisions usually don't care about the actual implementation. Once the deal is done, it falls on their "IT division". And two things happen: Jim over at IBM still pampers the exec with a dinner or two. And the exec also suspects that some, if not most, of the problems are with his IT team.
This assumes that IBM's core business is the same as their Services business. I doubt they have any overlap. They got onto the bandwagon after seeing how successful some of the early Indian services companies were (in terms of revenue) such as Infosys, Wipro, and TCS.
I would put the IT services business of Accenture, Cap Gemini, and IBM in the same bucket as the rest of the Indian firms.
Yes, the incremental refactor does appeal as a solution and we have been considering it.
Two potential drawbacks that were brought up are when there's a business "priority", the refactor will take a backseat, especially if the file is fully in JS.
The other is that with a larger codebase, this could take a year or even more and still not be fully done. But this is mitigated to a large extent by the fact that TS and JS can coexist and the benefits of a TS file are immediately available.
Does anyone have suggestions or experience moving a fairly large JS codebase to TS? There are libraries that will auto generate TS code but not sure what the pluses and minuses are when doing that on a live, shared codebase.
We asked ourselves the exact question and 75% of the team is in favor of moving to TS, so this thread is great validation!