> In the real world if you insist on breaking your paying customers' processes and products over and over again, (...) You do not break anyone's experience by

> In the real world if you insist on breaking your paying customers' processes and products over and over again, (...) You do not break anyone's experience by releasing a new version that's voluntarily adopted by your paying customers. You are also somehow inexplicably assuming that your paying customers didn't ended up being paying customers because you adapted to customer demands and added the value that was important enough to them that they decided to pay for it. I can tell you for a fact that there are paying customers for APIs that pay to use both the latest API and older versions. More often than not, they still consume old versions because they cannot spare the manpower to update some clients/services. On top of that,the problem grows a few orders of magnitude when you open your APIs to the public. Even when you control the only clients to your APIs, it's impossible to get some end users to upgrade their software. Some still run old OSes that have long been unsupported, and some are even physically unable to run updates.