email management system. Your customers email bugs, it spam filters it automatically,
it sorts them into areas, it assigns them to people, you can keep track
of them, you can set due dates, you can automatically reply to a customer with
a nice little message that gives them a link that they can click on to see the
status of their message. We use it for handling all our incoming company email
and make sure that it gets handled by the appropriate person.
Livingston: Would you consider when you released this product one of...

a big consulting company and then build a software company inside a consulting
company?” The consulting company was a means to an end. It was to get
cash flow, so that you could build a real software company. And when you were
done, the theory was you’d still have these consultants, but software companies
often need consulting arms.
The basic economic model for us and ArsDigita and those kinds of companies
was that you could get a bright MIT grad or whatever and give them a
salary of $75,000 to $125,000 a year,...

that’s what we thought our innovation was. It turned out not to have been what
we did.
Livingston: What did you do?
Spolsky: We started a consulting business and we hired a couple really smart
people. We had a few clients. We did the whole $60/$250 thing, which was
great, and that business then disappeared very rapidly out from under us. So we
became just a real software company.
Livingston: But you still kept a lot of your culture for the programmers.
Spolsky: Oh yeah. That was always sort of the goal,...

good at. And if you need to make some interactive websites or MTV needs a
web server or whatever the thing is, then you don’t even hire programmers; you
hire some people who know some people who might know something about the
technology. Eventually, you get somebody who thinks, “Let’s get some programmers
in here,” and they actually hire a programmer. And if they are lucky,
they get a good programmer, but they will torture that programmer until that
programmer wants to cry and leave.
A company that is not designed to create...

MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) or something like that. That particular
relationship, before Lotus completely acquired Iris, lasted long enough
that I thought that maybe this model would work.
I later talked to people that were involved, and they said, “Oh my God, the
tensions were unbelievable. It was a nightmare.” Lotus had to acquire them.
So the next thing we looked at was selling Fog Creek to some other company
that we thought could take us to market. We went through the whole song
and dance and negotiations with the company that...