Alternatively, the computer industry forgot about backward compatibility and now has to relearn it.
Color TV was designed to be compatible with black&white. Stereo FM radio compatible with mono, stereo vinyl records with mono. Electricity changes very, very slowly.
When computers become such an essential part of every day life, you cannot make radical changes any more every couple of years.
If your design becomes successful, you may be stuck with it for a couple of decades.
The failure of IPv6 is also the success of IPv4 engineering. When IPv6 was designed in the mid 90s, there were many issues that might hold back IPv4 down the road.
It is only in the last couple of years, that issues (related to the IPv4 address shortage) pop up that basically cannot be solved anymore and make IPv6 an attractive alternative.
> The failure of IPv6 is also the success of IPv4 engineering. When IPv6 was designed in the mid 90s, there were many issues that might hold back IPv4 down the road.
Another big part of it is that all of the features of IPv6 except the address length change were back-ported to IPv4 (e.g. address auto-assignment and IPsec) removing the carrots and leaving only the "stick" of the IPv4 address shortage (which barely registered at all until a few years ago) to push people to v6.
Color TV was designed to be compatible with black&white. Stereo FM radio compatible with mono, stereo vinyl records with mono. Electricity changes very, very slowly.
When computers become such an essential part of every day life, you cannot make radical changes any more every couple of years.
If your design becomes successful, you may be stuck with it for a couple of decades.
The failure of IPv6 is also the success of IPv4 engineering. When IPv6 was designed in the mid 90s, there were many issues that might hold back IPv4 down the road.
It is only in the last couple of years, that issues (related to the IPv4 address shortage) pop up that basically cannot be solved anymore and make IPv6 an attractive alternative.