[rocketraman]

There are always trade-offs though.

1) If you're busy maintaining backward compat, you're not busy building innovative new things -- Microsoft. 'nuf said.

2) You have a built-in excuse to not make your new stuff equal in functionality or greater to the old stuff, because hey, customers can just use the old stuff right? I built some software that talks to O365 Sharepoint. Ok, I have two choices of API: the older Sharepoint API or the newer Graph API. They recommend Graph, ok. Build the product and put it into production. Get a new customer requirement for fine-grained auth, and then find out that Graph doesn't handle fine-grained auth -- only the Sharepoint API does that. Oops. Ask Microsoft when that capability is coming to Graph? No timeline, because the Sharepoint API isn't deprecated.

3) Keeping old stuff working may be easier, but building new stuff is harder because the landscape is muddier -- how many times have you looked at Microsoft docs and found multiple ways to do things with no idea if the docs you're looking at actually apply to the approach you're using now?

I think there are ways to have (mostly) the best of both worlds. Linux does it by bring as much stuff in-tree as they can -- they break compat all the time for out-of-tree stuff. Ever try to keep a proprietary VMWare module building without errors? In-tree KVM never breaks because they're super careful with the ABI. Some languages have explicit mechanisms by which they attempt to keep things current, but make it easier on users -- Kotlin is an example of this [1] but its a young language so time will tell whether they can actually thread this needle. My experience so far is yes, I think they can -- I've updated code from Kotlin 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 with relatively little pain.

[1] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/evolution/kotlin-evolu...