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From experience with an app that doesn't auto-update, I know that the only thing that gets people to upgrade is a critical bug that affects them. People genera

From experience with an app that doesn't auto-update, I know that the only thing that gets people to upgrade is a critical bug that affects them. People generally keep using old versions of software for years. 90% of users don't care about new features or performance improvements or bug fixes that don't directly affect them. So I understand what they did. If they indeed introduced a version C that had a workaround to avoid crashing A, then they would have never gotten rid of A. No matter how hard they pushed C, some people would just continue to use A. But if A starts crashing, and there's an update available that fixes the issue, that's a really good motivator to get people to upgrade. Sure, it'll suck for everyone for a short while, but it'll soon be over once everyone has upgraded. And, as a dev, I also know that crashes are not the most serious kinds of bugs. They are usually easy to diagnose, and people realise that something is wrong right away -- much better than a bug that silently corrupts data, or a bug that causes subtly incorrect behavior.

sokoloff 7y ago
If your goal is to get rid of A by any means necessary, make the business decision to turn off A at some point. Not having the backbone to make that decision and allowing the call to forced at some arbitrary time by a bug and concluding the bug was a good thing (or at least had a silver lining) because it allowed the org to move away from A suggests a possible leadership decisiveness problem to me.
- user5994461 7y ago
  There is no organization of more than 500 employees that can take decisions like that. Developers of one service simply don't have the power to force other developer in another part of the organization to do anything. That's assuming they're even aware of the existence of that service and who is supposed to own it.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Someone has the ability to make that decision. CTO or CEO in the worst case. Having the decision "made for you" and being happy/relieved about it doesn't seem like the healthiest or firmest hand on the tiller way to run a company.
  - 8note 7y ago
    counterexample: the team I'm working on has successfully turned off ~10 systems with/without replacements, and got all of our clients within a much larger than 500 person org to migrate fully.
    - user5994461 7y ago
      I am not saying it's impossible. I'm doing that with hundreds of systems covering 5000+ developers/clients. Fact is, it's a nightmware to handle. It just takes one client who can't or won't upgrade and it's blocked forever.

sokoloff 7y ago

If your goal is to get rid of A by any means necessary, make the business decision to turn off A at some point. Not having the backbone to make that decision and allowing the call to forced at some arbitrary time by a bug and concluding the bug was a good thing (or at least had a silver lining) because it allowed the org to move away from A suggests a possible leadership decisiveness problem to me.

user5994461 7y ago
There is no organization of more than 500 employees that can take decisions like that. Developers of one service simply don't have the power to force other developer in another part of the organization to do anything. That's assuming they're even aware of the existence of that service and who is supposed to own it.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Someone has the ability to make that decision. CTO or CEO in the worst case. Having the decision "made for you" and being happy/relieved about it doesn't seem like the healthiest or firmest hand on the tiller way to run a company.
- 8note 7y ago
  counterexample: the team I'm working on has successfully turned off ~10 systems with/without replacements, and got all of our clients within a much larger than 500 person org to migrate fully.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    I am not saying it's impossible. I'm doing that with hundreds of systems covering 5000+ developers/clients. Fact is, it's a nightmware to handle. It just takes one client who can't or won't upgrade and it's blocked forever.