If your employer is to slow to keep updated, why should that slow MSFT down for you while the it is trying to reinvent itself, just catch up in 2015.
Just because it's trendy to bash MS for not releasing new browsers/IDEs/whatever every few weeks, that doesn't mean the vocal critics speak for all of us, nor even necessarily for the majority. I get paid to build stuff that works, and doing so requires stable foundations and reliable tools. Lately, I wish we had more Microsofts in the world paying attention to things like backward compatibility and long-term support, and fewer Googles and Mozillas and Apples who are quite happy to push out updates that break useful things that worked before.
There was nothing wrong with releasing a major version when you had major new features, more frequent minor versions that introduced minor features in a compatible way, and point releases for urgent security issues or bug fixes that didn't change any intended behaviour at all. This approach has worked for a long time, and IMNSHO the recent regular, fixed schedules for updates regardless of actual changes aren't doing most people any favours, and the version-free, always-online, push-updates-whenever stuff is just a mess that causes far more trouble than it's worth.
Did you mean forward compatibility?
No, I really did mean backward compatibility. Specifically, I was thinking of the degree to which MS have supported even very old (by IT standards) APIs and file formats and protocols even in much newer (again by IT standards) systems over the years, and the lengths they have sometimes gone to in order to maintain that support despite the potentially breaking changes not even being their fault in many cases.
However, I would also agree that they are better at forward compatibility than a lot of other major software developers today.
So here is one reason. Another one - is money - why spend every (or two) years money on product that is not bringing that much to the table (for a lot of projects at least I've been)