I recently read Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft? by Birchtree, where they say:

Microsoft just does not feel like a consumer tech company at all anymore. Yes, they have always been much more corporate than the likes of Apple or Google, but it really shows in the last few years as they seem to only have energy for AI and web services. If you are not a customer who is a major business or a developer creating the next AI-powered app, Microsoft does not seem to care about you.

Their thesis is that Microsoft’s share of the consumer market will plummet because the consumer is tech debt to them. I think of the user as a facet of tech debt, not the debt itself.

In Swimming in Tech Debt, I present eight questions you should answer about tech debt. One of them, called “Regressions”, asks how likely it will be that you will break working code for users that you care about. The more you might, the more, I believe, that you should not touch this code (or be very careful with it).

But, if you don’t care about the users, or they don’t care about the features the indebted code provides, then it’s likely that you can just rewrite it with impunity. You can change it without risk. You might be able to delete it. If so, it’s hardly a debt.

If you do value a market and change code radically, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.