I once asked a man who worked in marketing why Oreos keep making crazy new flavors like "sour patch kids Oreos" when the normal kind is great and clearly has no issues being sold. I could see some upside - it gets people talking about them, it's fun, it reinforces the normal flavor as the best chocolate cookie, etc. but I was still dubious that those benefits outweighed the cost of developing new flavors in a lab, paperwork for food safety, a new manufacturing process, new ads, new packaging, etc. especially for something temporary.

He said it's often just some new marketing exec wants to put something on their resume, and they have certain metrics that they target that don't necessarily align with long term profits of the company.

I'm sure software has a similar problem.