In technology, backward compatibility is a common issue. Some software companies like Microsoft have tried to keep most of what they created being backward compatible, so that files created in older versions will still work on newer versions. Even if this causes contortions to arise to be able to do new features, and makes the software less “elegant” and simple.
But, software that isn’t sufficiently backward compatible can have some big problems with getting people to adopt it. For example, the Python programming language is still having troubles getting programmers to switch from version 2.x to 3.x. Even though there are relatively few changes between the two, they are profound enough to make it very difficult in switching. This same problem faces attempts at education reform.