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I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic, I read his excellent blog articles way back when they were first written. His intelligence, business acumen and subsequent su

I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic, I read his excellent blog articles way back when they were first written. His intelligence, business acumen and subsequent success are not in dispute. I am a big fan of his ideas and work. But even I would say this marketing puff piece is over the top, I thought it must have been satire... "Back in 2000, two visionary founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it treated people — both its employees and its customers" Visionaries? The company they started was a consulting shop that only later transformed into software products when the dot com boom crashed and consulting dried up. Was that part of the vision? "The company they created, Fog Creek Software, has gone on to create multiple ground-breaking products and to help change the entire tech industry along the way." Trello is great and I use it myself, but it is a TODO list application and certainly not ground-breaking. FogBugz is a bug tracker, which is not ground-breaking, and was actually out-competed by JIRA. StackOverflow is definitely ground-breaking and I would agree changed the software development industry, but the original idea came from Jeff Atwood with Fog Creek providing mainly the money and initial public profile. "...other successful and influential products like Manuscript and Kiln and Copilot and CityDesk..." I mean no disrespect but I would not consider any of them successful and influential. Maybe Glitch will become a big product in the future, but for now can be step down the marketing intern that wrote this whilst drinking too much caffeine.

Meph504 8y ago
Firstly, I have to agree, this marketing on a 11 after a few too many red bulls. But I think you aren't considering what these services were at the time, when they first entered the market. Fogbugz, Manuscript and Kiln were some of the first to market quality web based products that were approachable to startups. Granted they were all over shadowed in time, but their contributions, by simply pushing concepts that not many others were at the time certainly deserves them some credit.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  Then again, Stack Overflow is just Expert Sexchange without the paywall. Not really a revolution.
SyneRyder 8y ago
>I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic... It might be worth pointing out that Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor aren't really involved at Fog Creek anymore. Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow now, and Michael is CEO at Trello. The CEO at Fog Creek has been Anil Dash since December 2016: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-new-ceo-of-fog-creek-software/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-n...
- anildash 8y ago
  Well, Joel is still the chairman of our board, and I spoke to both Joel & Michael them yesterday, so while they're certainly running Stack Overflow and Trello, respectively, we do benefit from their wisdom and experience. The video linked in this piece explains Glitch a bit, but since this was a corporate announcement (and really only of interest to people who track such things), I didn't want to go too far into talking about the product itself. Ironically, it was because I knew folks on HN would say this kind of announcement is too heavy on the marketing. On the plus side, we listed a bunch of new jobs, and the response seems to be extremely strong, so different people have different impressions about the announcement, I guess.

Meph504 8y ago

Firstly, I have to agree, this marketing on a 11 after a few too many red bulls. But I think you aren't considering what these services were at the time, when they first entered the market. Fogbugz, Manuscript and Kiln were some of the first to market quality web based products that were approachable to startups. Granted they were all over shadowed in time, but their contributions, by simply pushing concepts that not many others were at the time certainly deserves them some credit.

tinus_hn 8y ago
Then again, Stack Overflow is just Expert Sexchange without the paywall. Not really a revolution.

SyneRyder 8y ago

>I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic... It might be worth pointing out that Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor aren't really involved at Fog Creek anymore. Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow now, and Michael is CEO at Trello. The CEO at Fog Creek has been Anil Dash since December 2016: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-new-ceo-of-fog-creek-software/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-n...

anildash 8y ago
Well, Joel is still the chairman of our board, and I spoke to both Joel & Michael them yesterday, so while they're certainly running Stack Overflow and Trello, respectively, we do benefit from their wisdom and experience. The video linked in this piece explains Glitch a bit, but since this was a corporate announcement (and really only of interest to people who track such things), I didn't want to go too far into talking about the product itself. Ironically, it was because I knew folks on HN would say this kind of announcement is too heavy on the marketing. On the plus side, we listed a bunch of new jobs, and the response seems to be extremely strong, so different people have different impressions about the announcement, I guess.