The interesting thing...
The interesting thing is what they copied. They didn’t really copy the code;
they copied the implementation of how FogBugz works. But they missed what
made us successful. They didn’t really copy Joel on Software. And I think what’s
happening to those seven people right now is they are getting an object lesson
that merely copying the product that another company makes does not make
you successful. We’re not afraid of those people by any stretch of the imagination.
Sometimes they can be aggravating, but we don’t really care.
More than that though, we’ve long had a philosophy of pretty much ignoring
our competitors. When I first went to work at Microsoft, there was a person
on my team who decided it would be useful—it would get him some notoriety
internally—if he wrote a weekly email summarizing Microsoft’s competitors.
We were the Excel team, so it was really the spreadsheet competitors, Lotus
and Borland—what they were doing and what was new and what features they
had. He sent out this email internally at Microsoft to a bunch of people for
6 weeks, until he lost interest. I remember thinking that, no matter what we
knew that the competitors were doing, the information was completely useless
to us. It never really changed what we were doing. If it’s like, “The competitors
are going to do feature x,” well, if that’s such a good feature to do, why aren’t we
hearing about it from our customers?
In other words, why listen to our customers indirectly through what our
competitors do when we can just talk to our customers? So my mantra has
always been, “Listen to your customers, not your competitors.” I don’t know
who our competitors are. Sometimes I’m asked to list other bug-tracking products,
and by now I know about Bugzilla. I think there’s something called
BUGtrack. I don’t know what they have, what their products are, what their
price point is. I could research all that, but I can’t think of a single thing I would
do with that information.
I do want to talk to people who evaluated our software and then decided to
go with a different product instead. I want to know why they did. “Well, one of
your competitors has a wiki built in.” OK, maybe we’ll have some kind of wiki
integration. But, again, that’s something I would hear from our customers and
not from paying any attention to what our competitors are doing.
Livingston: Looking back on the earlier years, what was most surprising to you?
Spolsky: Most? It was all surprising. One thing that surprised me was that,
| ← Joel Spolsky 355 | when we released → |