It's about why Microsoft with IE6 won the browser war against Netscape who made the single worst strategic mistake a software company can make by rewriting Netscape 6.0 throwing out all the code from Netscape 4.
Netscape was working with extremely buggy and convoluted code in the older version and trying to save the development community from the nightmare that is IE6, ended being late to the market with a superior product. Joel makes a very good observation that often people want to throw out old code because they think it's a mess, but the truth is counter intuitive that the old code contains vast amounts of knowledge.
A company can be first, best, or cheat and in this case while Netscape was trying to be best, Microsoft was first.
This is the reason iterative code development is best. Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration 9 out of 10 times. Boyd's Law of Iteration (http://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/) The best software is software that released most often, not released the most correct.
If I was to release a browser in say 2008 to compete with the dominance of IE, what is the single most important feature I could put into that browser? I'd put a feature for forcing iteration, so that the browser can automatically update on the client finishing a development cycle rather than release the update preinstalled unable to remove on newly bought computers.
Funny thing is, Microsoft did almost the same thing with Windows NT. However, unlike Netscape, they had the resources to keep iterating their old junk while they worked on the totally new version.
Spolsky mentions that Microsoft was going to rewrite Word for Windows and Mac with the same code base, but someone decided because at the time Word Perfect was a better product, they should skip that idea.
It's about why Microsoft with IE6 won the browser war against Netscape who made the single worst strategic mistake a software company can make by rewriting Netscape 6.0 throwing out all the code from Netscape 4.
Netscape was working with extremely buggy and convoluted code in the older version and trying to save the development community from the nightmare that is IE6, ended being late to the market with a superior product. Joel makes a very good observation that often people want to throw out old code because they think it's a mess, but the truth is counter intuitive that the old code contains vast amounts of knowledge.
A company can be first, best, or cheat and in this case while Netscape was trying to be best, Microsoft was first.
This is the reason iterative code development is best. Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration 9 out of 10 times. Boyd's Law of Iteration (http://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/) The best software is software that released most often, not released the most correct.
If I was to release a browser in say 2008 to compete with the dominance of IE, what is the single most important feature I could put into that browser? I'd put a feature for forcing iteration, so that the browser can automatically update on the client finishing a development cycle rather than release the update preinstalled unable to remove on newly bought computers.