Why Compatibility Is Not the Same as Replaceability
A system rarely becomes hard to replace because of one feature. It becomes hard to replace because, over time, too much behavior accumulates around it. By the time teams start talking about replacement, they are usually not evaluating a product anymore. They are confronting years of embedded assumptions, hidden routines, and interface logic that no longer exists anywhere else. 1. Replacement Usually Fails at the Edges When organizations discuss replacement, attention usually goes to the visible core: the database engine, the platform, the application, the API. In practice, replacement rarely fails at the core first. It fails at the edges: scheduler jobs, exports, drivers, reports, permissions, monitoring, admin scripts, and exception handling. The product is only one layer of the dependency. The harder part is everything that accumulated around it without ever being named as architecture. 2. Compatibility Solves Only the Visible Layer Compatibility is still useful. Syntax support,...