There's also "You Are Not Microsoft", i.e. you do not have millions of users who would be impacted if this API changed. Sure, if you're at a scale where a few t

There's also "You Are Not Microsoft", i.e. you do not have millions of users who would be impacted if this API changed. Sure, if you're at a scale where a few thousand people would be impacted, or at the severity where whoever is affected would be really affected (e.g. medical software), do not break compatibility. But if your product is used by a dozen people and it's not keeping them alive, it's maybe okay if it breaks. Sure, you alienate those dozen people, but you can't keep a company running on a dozen users. And besides, if you have a dozen users, you can literally afford to spend time fixing their specific setups. That's the other flip side. People assume that because Microsoft/Google/etc. provide impersonal, poor customer service, they should provide equally impersonal, poor customer service. Bad customer service is a trade-off you make to have scale. If you don't have scale, you can avoid that trade-off.