Reading on the net today about a blog entry from a Microsoft employee about the importance of backward compatibility, I was struck by how absurd the assertion was. The premise was that an IT department had showed up in Redmond and had indicated they had over 9000 install scripts for the users machines that they were maintaining and that proved backward compatibility was important. To me, it proves that by maintaining backward compatibility, Microsoft is encouraging lock-in and missing an opportunity to solve (with the aid of their software partners) the real problem of configuration management.