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

"never a good idea to do a complete rewrite"

[paulbd]

ahem. what was NT for? sometimes, you just have to come to terms with the fact that as tested, bug-fixed and studied as a chunk of code may be, it was developed as part of a misconceived model of either visible functionality or internal architecture or both. DOS and its progeny like win32 were clearly cases of this, and MS weathered a complete rewrite c/o cutler and co. quite happily. the fact that there are examples of disastrous complete rewrites doesn't mean that the examples that worked are meaningless.

Re:Why the Linux project fails

[flacco]

I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.

You could go on, but it's the end of a workday and you have to punch the ol' Microsoft time clock.