I am reminded of how Postel's Law has fallen from Iron Law of the Internet to somewhat distasteful in the past 5-10 years. Yes, it's no fun to break your client

I am reminded of how Postel's Law has fallen from Iron Law of the Internet to somewhat distasteful in the past 5-10 years. Yes, it's no fun to break your clients and customers today. But if you don't do it today, and you don't do it next month, next year, or the next four years, you'll find yourself in a position where you can't do anything anymore because you've basically let Hyrum's Law "build up" in your system until there's no room to move. Obviously, one should not willy-nilly break customers for no reason. The point is not to create a management metric around Number Of Times We've Broken The Customer and reward the team for getting their numbers up, up, up. The point is to retain flexibility and the ability to move forward, and that is done through intelligent design up front to the extent possible, and carefully selecting when to break customers over the course of years. It's always expensive and should definitely be treated as an expense, not a benefit on its own terms. But as the Hyrum's Law "builds up" its expense to the company over all will in not really all that long overwhelm the costs of the occasional breakage to stay up-to-date with the world.