[dlitz]

> Myth? MS built a very successful business on it.

It's also an unsustainable business. How long do you think MS will be able to maintain backward full compatibility? 100 years? 200 years?

> Customers don't care why your software just broke or whose fault it was, all they care about is it broke.

Customers aren't engineers; they don't know better. We do. In any, it's going to be cheaper to abandon the stubborn customers than it will be to maintain decades worth of backward compatibility, at some point.

[ajross]

100 years sounds reasonable. Old APIs simply get frozen and new ones take their place. Apps written to .NET, for example, aren't bound by compatibility concerns with the early win32 GDI implementations. Cocoa apps aren't impacted by Carbon's compatibility concerns.

What's the option? Throw whole platforms out and start over every 15 years? Does that scale? It has so far only because the industry has been growing (more smartphones than PCs, more PCs than workstations, more workstations than minicomputers, etc...). But it won't grow forever.