The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Joel Mentioned on Slashdot

Joel wrote the foreword to this book? Slashdot reviewer loved it.

http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/11/19/1333258.shtml

Friday the 21st
Friday, November 21, 2003

Just wait until the Slashdot crew finds out that Joel has the audacity to actually charge money for his software ...

Mitch & Murray (from downtown)
Friday, November 21, 2003

Actually, Rick posts here occasionally, mostly to discuss ideas related to his book or future books.

As for the book, we've had several long discussions on it here which centered around: Don't buy it if you're looking for hard numbers, but if you're into anecdotal evidence, you'll love it.

Not to restart THAT flamewar.

As for me, I strongly recommend it to those who found The Mythical Man Month & Peopleware valuable and entertaining. It moves in a similar textual fashion.

Dustin Alexander
Friday, November 21, 2003

I read a particularly good comment on MS's supposed business genius. I'm not saying MS isn't run by a number of brilliant people. I'm just saying they often get way more credit than they deserve, and this always gets lost in the background when yet another book is released about why company A is buried in the trash heap of history while company B (for now) thrives.

This slashdot reply makes this point eloquoently:
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"Microsoft's past is littered with failures: Microsoft Bob, early versions of Windows, early versions of PocketPC, all versions of Smartphone so far, the original MSN "Blackbird", LAN Manager, UltimateTV, Windows At Work, Windows DNA, and huge internal projects like Pyramid and Cairo that never even saw the light of day --- these are just some of the examples.

None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.

It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushed by Microsoft, because they made mistakes". Everybody makes mistakes. The difference is that the monopolist gets a lot more lives.

Ditto for Intel. What other company could have survived the IA64 debacle? Yet Intel has, on the back of its x86 near-monopoly. "

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Smart people running a (ruthless)monopoly on a resource as ubiquitous as PC is key.

http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86379&cid=7531436

Crimson
Friday, November 21, 2003

Agreed. And Ricks book does to some degree come off in a fashion that exults Microsoft. But, to his credit, he doesn't worship them and does mention their failures. He is careful to mention their near brushes with doom and how they dealt with it. His fundamental point is that they have survived by not making a fatal 'stupid mistake' yet, but that they will always be at risk of doing so.

After all, for all the things we can say about Microsoft, they do a good job of courting their developers, expanding their educational community, and providing platform support to vendors. These are a few of the issues that killed the likes of Ashton Tate and Micropro.

Dustin Alexander
Friday, November 21, 2003

Intel didn't want the x86 monopoly.

When they first launched the 8086 processor, they didn't expect it to catch on like it did. But as more and more people started using it, eventually, they couldn't change the architecture without breaking compatibility with the software already written for it. That's why we have it today.

Saturday, November 22, 2003

"Everybody makes mistakes. The difference is that the monopolist gets a lot more lives."

Get real. I read Stupidity. MS competition for OS's for the PC was IBM. Windows vs. OS/2. Claiming that MS beat IBM because of its "monopoly" is ridiculous. IBM could have yanked that monopoly away in a minute. Besides, OS/2 was supposed to replace DOS in 1987. As Chapman says, IBM was monumentally dumb.

And as loyal WordPerfect user, yeah, I have to say Chapman nailed it again. WordPerfect for Windows 1.0 sucked.

Saturday the 22nd
Saturday, November 22, 2003

"Don't buy it if you're looking for hard numbers, but if you're into anecdotal evidence, you'll love it."

Not sure how marketing disasters and hard numbers mix. As Chapman says, IBM charged too much for OS/2, it couldn't print (I bought one of the first copies and it didn't support my LJ), Warp was a stupid name, you couldn't buy apps for it, etc etc. Not sure that's "anecdotal." Just seems to be the facts. Not sure how you stick that in a spreadsheet.

Saturday the 22nd
Saturday, November 22, 2003

But OS/2 ran some windows apps better than windows.

I think that was the primary reason for its demise. Developers wrote for Windows, knowing the software would run on OS/2.

If the Linux crowds want to kill windows, they should have tools that write for linux, and then have some free and painless way of having those run on windows. The way they are going now with wine will eventually kill them as it did OS/2.

Get developers used to developing for your platform, even if it runs on other platforms. Get users (read IT buyers/managers) thinking ... this *app I can't live without* (read Office) runs platform OS/2, but is natively built for Windows. At some point, the question becomes why bother with OS/2.

Tapiwa
Saturday, November 22, 2003

"But OS/2 ran some windows apps better than windows.

I think that was the primary reason for its demise. Developers wrote for Windows, knowing the software would run on OS/2."

Chapman says that was a mistake. But I never had apps run better in OS/2. The subsystem was a disaster. A Windows crash usually brought down OS/2 as well.

OS/2 "crashproof?" Not.

Saturday the 22nd
Saturday, November 22, 2003

"If the Linux crowds want to kill windows, they should have tools that write for linux"

They really need the equivalent of a vb rad sort of environment. And oh, yeah, it should be free.

Mike
Saturday, November 22, 2003

One of the reasons Windows beat OS/2 is that IBM was still thinking big corporates, and used to snub their nose at the little developers who, in the end, turned out to be the innovation factories that created the useful applications.

IBM used to treat little developers as if they should be grateful IBM would even speak to them, whereas Microsoft had come from that same background, and respected and understood those developers.

.
Saturday, November 22, 2003

Re OS/2:

You guys are forgetting, again, that even if IBM did everything perfectly; the "IBM PC Company" was threatened by Microsoft to have to pay full retail for Windows 95 if they dared preload OS/2 on any of their boxes.

Game over.

MD
Monday, November 24, 2003

"You guys are forgetting, again, that even if IBM did everything perfectly; the "IBM PC Company" was threatened by Microsoft to have to pay full retail for Windows 95 if they dared preload OS/2 on any of their boxes."

Not forgetting anything. As Chapman says, OS/2 was supposed to replace DOS in 1987. Three years before Windows 3. OS/2 succeeds, no Windows 95.

Chapman is right about no institutional memory. Leads to people getting things wrong like you did.

Monday the 24th
Monday, November 24, 2003