I can think of quite a few, most notably perhaps is Microsoft. But really, you are totally overstating this "problem", changes between releases are typically small, big changes in sub systems are announced and discussed to death long before they are actually implemented in a release.
Probably you have never been in the position of maintaining a large scale system. I'm not talking about hobbyists system here. You cannot simply take "off the shelve" hardware for Linux and hope that just because it runs now it will continue to run with the next kernel.
Examples? Last week, kernel update, but vmware does no longer work. Some obscure call in the network layer of linux takes now one argument instead of two, where the second argument was always zero. The cost to include a backwards compatible call that ignores the second argument (which is in this particular case the right approach) would have been close to zero. The cost of patching vmware is (for us) larger because it includes downtime and man hours of work.
Another example? Apparently, some kernel call the NVIDIA driver needs is no longer in place, so if you update your kernel, graphics no longer works, and re-compiling the nvidia driver fails. There is a new driver, but this has other bugs that were not fixed. This is "annoying" for a personal user because the procedure of updating such drivers is more complex than on other systems, but it causes real costs on large scale systems.
So your company wants to have drivers in the kernel, but you are too cheap and/lazy to actually maintain them?
I don't have a company, but I'm working in a computing center. Even if I had a company, I would rather prefer to sell products that continue to work for ten years with drivers unchanged and have the operating system maintainer to keep care of it rather than to continuously have to invest money in a product that no longer creates any profit because it is no longer sold. Somehow the engineers that do all the patching and cleanup behind the kernel hackers have to be paid, too. You seem to forget that.
I'm not a fan of Windows and I don't use it privately, but for today, I can get a driver from Windows Vista (probably ten years old) and install it under Windows 8.1 and it works. You can think of this as you like, but if you ask me, then that shows at least that MS cares about their products and keeps the interface stable. It creates an ecosystem which makes it worth for hardware vendors to invest into it by selling products once and keep consmers happy. Of course MS make their customers pay for this, but one way or another, nothing is for free.
For Linux, you pay for service time because you need somebody to clean up behind the kernel hackers causing consistently interface changes. For Windows, you pay for the product. For an enterprise, it is often simpler and easier just to pay for the product and get the warranty that it continues to run. For Linux, this model also exists in the form of support contracts (e.g. by SuSe, the one we have) but my overall impression is that even with that you have to invest more time if you upgrade SuSe to the next release because there are so many dependencies between the installations that you cannot simply carry your software over. Basically, you have to replace the entire software layer with a new release.
Open source and closed source are just two different models. You have to pay for either, one way or another. Closed source is often easier for the user, and not necessarily more expensive, depending on how you value your time. If I, in my spare time, run my linux system, that's all fine for me. But if I had to write invoices to my boss for that, then that would be a quite expensive system.
That unmaintained code stops working is a good thing, good riddance.
Actually, no. It rather means that the Os "vendor" does not have the goal of creating a commercial ecosystem that would allow hardware vendors to invest into. Which is pretty much the problem why open source never reached mainstream. Unixoid systems are successful where its vendor keeps care about it itself and uses a much stricter development model, and where hardware and Os are much more coupled than in the PC market. For example, see Android. That's "Linux with a Windows business model". Because Os vendor and hardware vendor are identical or much more dependent on each other, no problem.
