I don't think this is what Joel is referring to at all. He's talking about literally codebase rewrites. In all your examples, there was not existing code base t

I don't think this is what Joel is referring to at all. He's talking about literally codebase rewrites. In all your examples, there was not existing code base that was rewritten. A company tried to innovate on an existing idea, yes, but that's not what Joel is arguing against here.