when we released a new version of our software (we’re on 5.0 with FogBugz
already), there would be a big jump in the number of sales. We would say, “OK,
all the upgraders are upgrading right now, so that’s what accounts for the
boost.” And the surprise is that after that initial boost, the number never went
down. We expected there would be a hump after a new version was released
and that would make us want to keep releasing new versions. But instead there
was a step. A big step up. We kept...

software companies did not do bug tracking. Or 80 percent of commercial software
companies did not write specifications. Or 99 percent of commercial
software companies did not do usability testing.
If you were an alien and you came here in 1991 and you wanted to learn
how to develop software, you would learn ten times as much at Microsoft as
anywhere else, I think, because I watched these companies kind of flail making
mistakes. There were things—really basic things, that companies did not know.
Microsoft knew that loading a segment register on the...

database and the name in the application. Ruby on Rails finally said, “It’s no big
deal if you’re just forced to use the same name in both places. You know, it
doesn’t really matter.” And suddenly it becomes much simpler and much
cleaner. To me, that is an elegant hack—saying, “This particular distinction that
we used to fret over, just throw it away.”
I don’t know if that’s what makes a good hacker. I guess that would be
answering a slightly different question to what’s a brilliant hack. I guess a brilliant
hacker...

awful for all kinds of reasons. Let’s make good backup software.” That’s a big
project. I want to have the organization that I don’t have yet where, when we
Joel Spolsky 359
get those ideas, we can produce the products. Because the capital is sort of endless.
Capital is not a problem for us. Even if it was a problem for us, there’s VC.
The real problem is how to deploy that capital to create software, and that’s
something that we want to make the machine that is able to do.
Livingston: What...