[lucozade]

I used to work at a startup where the CEO would make us do big major, random version jumps to make the products appear more mature.

I was occasionally tasked with gently telling a client that they didn't need to mobilise the world as the only changes to their version of the code were a few minor bug fixes. How they laughed. Not.

I, semi-seriously, suggested that, if we didn't give formal meaning to the versions, we should do client specific versioning: we sent them the release notes and they could decide whether it was minor or breaking and how much integration testing would be needed.

That way everyone could play along. Never took off.