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2007-02-04More Spolsky Gems: Open-Source, the Desktop, and Supporting CustomersI needed to get back on the rowing machine after avoiding exercise for almost two weeks. This gave me a chance to listen to the Joel Spolsky interview on the micro-ISV Podcast. {tags: orcmid Channel 9 Joel Spolsky Michael Lehman Bob Walsh micro-ISV nano-ISV} Early in the interview, Joel talks about having now graduated to mini-ISV with a dozen employees that tend to 24 when the interns arrive in June. It is fascinating how much, and how well, Fog Creek does with interns. I think it provides great resume chops for the interns too and most of all an early experience at successfully delivering product. In the course of the conversation, Spolsky explains that the original vision for Fog Creek was to produce a comprehensive software [I thought he said “content”] management solution. Joel now thinks that there is no such distinct category as content management, but out of that vision FogBugz, the main Fog Creek product, emerged. FogBugz is a bug and feature-tracking package that is an instance of workflow management and was, it seems, intended to be part of the infrastructure for the grander product. I am fascinated by the following harmonies in how Fog Creek grows as a business. The first product was something that was useful in its own development and deployment. It is also valuable to other companies like Fog Creek itself, in providing an important workflow package for their own bug and feature tracking. The Copilot package for remote on-line assistance came out of a similar situation: making it easier for their customers to install an on-line assistance package so that on-line troubleshooting and assistance could take place. Copilot exists so that the setup for assistance doesn’t itself become a problem requiring assistance and getting in the way of resolving the customer’s original problem. The key is how this is all around supporting users and customers and part of establishing a reliable relationship with adopters of Fog Creek products. It also underscores the message at the end of the interview about needing the business person as well as the developer in a micro-ISV, and needing a clean vertical focus for the initial product(s). In the discussion of Copilot, Joel talks about the value of developing Copilot as an open source product and how they learned that there is nothing to fear from people cloning the product, after seeing clones of FogBugz come and go. What cloners failed to copy was the know-how related to application and support of the product. (I once observed a team’s attempt to clone a purloined compiler onto a different computer. With no understanding for the principles of operation of the original code and how to unravel and re-engineer the code-generation model for the second computer, there was no useful result of any kind, not even understanding of what failed to be understood.) There is more discussion about how much ISV staff (at least half, in Joel’s view) must be devoted to non-development activities and how that ratio grows ever greater with larger companies. The discussion also turned to Joel’s current view that the web, not the desktop, is the place to do application development these days. There is presumed to be a hefty environment provided by the browser of course. He wasn’t asked about the “smart client” case, where deployment is supposed to be as easy as using a browser, but he’s probably right in supposing that Ajax (and perhaps PF/E, I wonder) makes dedicated desktop applications increasingly unnecessary. This doesn’t dissuade me as an user, but it gives me pause as a developer.
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