Compatibility

Monday, March 24th, 2008

As a product manager you should care a great deal on compatibility - not only between your product and other products but also between different versions of your product. As you over time increasingly pure in new features you should take every care to ensure that existing customers using your product and the resulting output (e.g. documents created with version 1.0) are compatible with your new product. This is not an easy task.

The always good read at Joel on Software has recently - yet again I may add - commented us with a great story on compatibility - this time on web standards. You should definitely check it out. Read his Martian Headsets and you will understand why Joel is a member of the pragmatic camp - no doubt about that.

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice.

Myself I always strives for idealism in a pragmatic way ;-)

Other good reads on the same subject are:

• How Microsoft Lost the API war
• Strategy Letter II: Chicken-and-Egg Problems

By the way I can recommend Joel's book Joel On Software - both of above links are in the book.