Backward compatibility as a marketing feature
Most companies treat backward compatibility as engineering hygiene. The companies that lean into it find it’s one of the most under-marketed product features they have.
Maintaining backward compatibility is expensive. Engineering teams resent it. Product teams forget to factor it into roadmaps. And yet, customers, particularly enterprise customers, buy from vendors who maintain it over vendors who don’t.
Why customers care
Every breaking change a vendor ships is an engineering project on the customer’s side. Customers add up the cost of those projects when deciding which vendors to keep. A vendor with a reputation for backward compatibility saves the customer money, and the customer notices.
Marketing it
Most companies don’t talk about their backward-compat policy because they don’t think it’s marketable. It’s actually one of the most credible differentiators in enterprise software. "Our APIs haven’t broken backward compatibility in three years" is a sentence that closes deals.
Backward compatibility is enterprise marketing dressed as engineering hygiene.