How To Make Software Projects Fail

Bob Abooey writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution has an interesting interview of Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame. Joel, a former programmer at Microsoft, discusses some of the reasons he thinks some very popular software companies or projects fail, including Netscape, Lotus 123, Borland, etc." This interview brings out some mild boiler-room stories which sound like they could be the basis of a good book, along the lines of Soul of a New Machine .

Comments

Easy....

[DAldredge]

Have a product that competes directly with Microsoft...

Re:Perhaps you should read the article

[Skim123]

I had the opportunity to talk to a woman at Microsoft who use to work for Sun. She was big believe on Java when it was knew, thinking of the possiblities, but resigned after Sun took Java and killed it.

Regardless of what Cringely says, you should read the interview before jumping to conclusions. Do you agree with me that a number of companies that "lost" to Microsoft lost because they made bad business decisions? If the answer is, "No," read the interview, think about things for a while, then get back to me.

Re:Bloatware

[Xoro]

Actually, I totally agreed with him on the bloat issue, especially this comment:

Joel: There's a famous fallacy that people learn in business school called the 80/20 rule. It's false, but it seduces a lot of dumb software startups. It seems to make sense. 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. The trouble here, of course, is that it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

People keep citing 80/20 when discussing "almost there" free office suites, and this is exactly why that logic doesn't fly. Particularly when the users across a single organization don't even use the same 20% of the features.

Re:Perhaps you should read the article

[rodgerd]

If you'd bothered quoting in context, you'd note that Cringley is referring to C# as Java in drag, hence Bill betting on Java. But I guess you're interesting in rigging quotes to attack someone for having the temerity to question the all-powerful edifice of Java.

And, FWIW, when Sun released Java, they made no distinction between the various components of Java - the language, the standard library, or the VM. Referring to it as "buggy" is no more inaccurate than Sun's own ongoing failure to distinguish between the language and the standard libraries.

Amusing, no?

[swordgeek]

I just thought it was funny that an article on "How to make software projects fail" followed immediately after an article related to OS/2.