While I agree that GCP's deprecation policy is painful, I don't think he's painting a compelling picture that the deprecation policy, specifically, is the reaso

While I agree that GCP's deprecation policy is painful, I don't think he's painting a compelling picture that the deprecation policy, specifically, is the reason GCP isn't ranked higher. Taking two of the examples of "bad platform moves": Python 3 and Apple. Where I work, we are simultaneously dealing with Python 3 and GCP deprecations[1], and it sucks. But Python is more popular than ever![2] Yes, some people (including us, at least for our website code) left Python, but lots and lots of people have moved to Python 3. I've seen lots of people say "oh, the move from 2 to 3 wasn't that bad because of the tooling." That's probably true, and we probably wouldn't be moving to Go were it not for the fact that we had API changes _and_ Python's changes to deal with (and Go gives us other benefits). And then there's Apple. Apple has a long history of maintaining compatibility for a time, and then getting rid of the bits that are holding them back. There are tradeoffs. Maybe Android doesn't break things for developers, but Apple makes it so that iPhone users can keep updating their phones to the latest OS (and apps) for much longer than the typical Android phone. Because of deprecations and a general desire to make apps that fit the platform, developers of popular apps on iOS put the time into updating them, and these apps are really nice to use as a result. I think fit and finish on non-first-party native Mac apps tends to be better than those on average on Windows, though that's just my opinion. Carrying backwards compatibility comes with tradeoffs, and it's possible to be successful by making different tradeoffs than maximizing backward compatibility. [1]: https://blog.khanacademy.org/go-services-one-goliath-project/ https://blog.khanacademy.org/go-services-one-goliath-project... [2]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/07/27/language-rankings-6-20/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/07/27/language-rankings-6-2...