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 thinking it was a hump that was going to go
down, then it never went down again.
Now I understand why that is. You made a better product. When you have
a better product, you will win more of the evaluations. More people who evaluate
your product will decide to purchase it. So you are now on a new permanently
high plateau in sales caused by the fact that you have a better product. It
overcomes more of the hurdles that your software is put through when users
evaluate it to see if it meets their needs.
Livingston: Who did you learn things from?
Spolsky: Oh, everyone. I can’t even begin to list the number of people who
taught me things.
I was in the Israeli army, and I learned some strategy there by mistake, by
osmosis. In order to avoid spending too much time in uniform, I did this
Joel Spolsky 357
kibbutz army program. It was two years on a kibbutz, which is a communal farm
in Israel. They usually have industry, and the kibbutz I was on had a bakery,
which was this gigantic factory that made bread. I spent almost 2 years making
bread every night in this factory that made hundreds of thousands of loaves of
bread. It was not artisan bread by any stretch of the imagination. It was a big,
noisy bakery. There are so many things that I learned from that about how
people work, how to think about working, how to manage, how an assembly line
might be organized, how industrial machinery works.
But my first job at Microsoft is really where I learned the software industry.
I got there in 1991. At the time, there were almost—I hesitate to say this, but—
no software companies that really knew the basics of how to develop software in
the way that Microsoft did. They accomplished what they did because they figured
out a ton of things about how to make software, repeatedly and reliably,
that people want to buy, that nobody else had figured out. And they were doing
things like bug tracking—like having a bug-tracking database—that seem completely
obvious, and, when you looked around, 80 percent of commercial

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