Backward Compatibility

Ian Murdock illustrates the importance of backward compatibility. I believe it is extremely important to backward compatible, after all it is like a contract with your customers, the older ones. It will not be of much value to the newer ones, until they grow old with the product. However, I think that, just like many other things, a balance is very important. We cannot take an extremist approach. For example, the example that Ian gives is about Windows team making sure that it is backward compatible with SimCity, rather a SimCity bug. What happens when SimCity evolves, fixes that bug and later drops support for the older version? Does Windows team change their code? Or keep that SimCity specific code in the OS? I do not have enough knowledge to judge whether what Windows did was right or wrong. But I feel that we should have a long term approach for backward compatibility that identifies and clarifies these dependencies, like Ian says, to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don’t break.