3 ms·
Off the back of Joel's blog posts I convinced my employer to go with FogCreek CoPilot (remote control / remote assist software), and it was such a disappointmen
by jodrellblank 3y ago
Off the back of Joel's blog posts I convinced my employer to go with FogCreek CoPilot (remote control / remote assist software), and it was such a disappointment; after all the blog posts about how to Do Software Right(tm) I has raised my expectations that the result of all this process and care would surely be as good as anything could reasonably be. It had few features, was unreliable and slow from the UK, and comparatively expensive.
It's a long time ago so I can't remember the details, but it's stuck with me for ~15 years as a lesson in not believing the hype, and ... I dunno, you can't procedure your way into building amazing things, maybe? Post-hoc looking back from the outside, FogCreek building somewhat generic tools for developers seems very navel-gazing like they didn't have a burningly compelling idea (such as StackOverflow was) and you can't add more private offices unto business/market success.
- hermitcrab 3y agoI guess it was (at least initially) built by interns.
- toyg 3y agoThe compelling idea was supposed to be CityDesk. This was pre-Wordpress, when everyone was building a CMS because normies were paying top dollar to be able to write on the web. Joel described it in a post as "the future belongs to people who can make JavaScript sing", which was slightly ahead of time. As many developers did at the time (and still do), they built their own tools, and eventually realized their bugtracker was decent enough to sell to Joel's blog readers. FogBugz sales quickly outstripped CityDesk, so they pivoted to selling Dev tools. From there onwards, they were a bit all over the place. They still managed to score StackOverflow and Trello, though...