The Joel on Software Discussion Group

I know Joel would never reveal the name, but I am curious as to which is the large competitor to FogCreek that Joel mentions in his latest Inc. article: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html?partner=fogcreek

In my opinion FogBugz has no real competition, it's so much better than anything else out there, so I was surprised to see that Joel is worried about another company eating into FogCreek's market.

So, any guesses on who the rival is?

Atlassian Jira.

 http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

I'd guess accurev or microsoft?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems

Also, DHH from 37s takes a shot at Joel's article:

 http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2002-bug-tracking-isnt-a-network-effect-business

I think David's arguing a straw man, personally.  I'm not sure he really understood the concerns Joel is expressing in the article.

I'm with DHH on this one.  I think Joel is making a mistake, but also for a slightly different reason as well - developers (the target audience/market for defect tracking software) are typically good at going out of their way to find the best/better software available to use for tools.  If the value is there (not like pricing from Rational/IBM...) then there will be a market.  Note also that the examples Joel used happened pre-internets.  I think the fear that no one will find you or use you if you have a good product these days is silly - Joel's presence and Fog Creek's presence is pretty well established so it is easy for people to find his product.  I also don't think that the bug tracking world is necessarily a market that can/will be dominated by one player/product.

His competition is most likely not from one other competitor - it is from companies who write their own - when they should use an off-the-shelf one.

@TimJ

But developers do not always have the last word as to what package is purchased. For example, if somebody else (tech team) is to maintain the bugtracker for the developers, they may prefer to get a bugtracker which comes with a support contract, even if the developers do not care about one.

Rational which is owned by IBM now. They have clearquest which is a bug tracking software that plugs ino with clearcase, their version managing software. It is VERY expensive and I have used it on large projects.

There is also a produce called PVCS. I have used this on 2 large defense projects. It is cheaper than rational.

I have never used Joel's software. These bug tracking tools are generally good enough for my needs.

Tangent, but I saw JIRA ads in the codinghorror blog today and I thought "wait a minute"...

@Contractor
Oh god. PVCS. The horror. The horror. I thought the 80s were over ?

I had to use pvcs (using the browser) for a year - this was only a year ago.  What a nightmare.

The atlassian danger is that they have a larger suite of developer tools that work together.

Well, the very fact that his competitor is not obvious to us yet means that the market is still fragmented enough for one player to emerge as the 'big fish' I think...

That said, go Mantis!

The issue Joel has is that he said he'll go crazy and add every little feature that people say they use another system for. To me that seems like committing suicide. Don't build a product with more features than a competitor, build a product that is better.

I use Lighthouse for my issue tracking and I know a few people who have moved from FogBugz to Lighthouse. The reason they moved isn't because Lighthouse has more features, it is because Lighthouse has LESS. It looks at what it's target audience needs feature wise and then implements them very well.

What Joel needs to do is, instead of adding features, refine current features. So what is JIRA has feature X that FogBugz doesn't have. Focus on features A, B and C that both have and make sure that FogBugz has by far the best implementation of them. Quality provides a much more sustainable product than quantity.

1st - My assumption was JIRA.  Never heard of it until suddenly all my friends who code in java were using it and talking about it like it was the one true bug tracking tool and the matter was settled.  That was weird.

2nd - I think  Joel has to decide what kind of company he wants - does he want to be Microsoft or does he want to be 37Signals?

I'm not surprised a 37Signals guy would take offense at Joel's article.  I mean, MS Project was /the/ established player, and, arguably, still is, but 37signals came and asked the question "what if you didn't want to make fake graphs to impress management, but instead wanted to actually run the project?"  and developed an entirely different tool - without bells and whistles.

Reading the article, I can see Joel's arguments, I just wonder if

(A) The Bug Tracking market needs to consolidate the way the word processing market did,

(B) The bug tracking market is going to consolidate the way the word processing market did,

(C) Is the bug tracking market big enough for tbese kinds of massive growth schemes to continue?

I think (C) is the killer.  I suspect Joel will go meta, saying "it's not just bug tracking!  You can break down the bugs by task, estimate them, type in features instead of bugs -- it's project management!  Hey, it has a wiki!  Hey it has ... email!"

... and his company will become "Big Macs" ( In his words: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html )

But it's easy for me to take pot shots from here.  I suspect, if things start to fall apart, Joel is smart enough to notice and adjust. Time will tell.

regards,

I need to chime in. One thing I always liked about FogCreek was that it seemed to set the product direction. Sure, they took customer feedback, but they weren't caving just to keep a few whiners happy. Now they seem to be going the make everyone happy route. I think this is bad.

What joel needs is another Developer tool.  And heck, I'll even share... a lightweight ETL tool. How many times have we written stuff to import Comma delimited files and then apply some mapping rule? Sure, Biz Talk is out there but, entirely too heavy. Keep it simple! But, do it.

Maybe by announcing this, he's going the 'Fire and Motion' route.

It depends on how they implement the new features. If they are non-intrusive then it won't bother customers. For example, if 80% of customers just need to do X,Y, and Z and don't care about the rest of the features... then its a problem if it is confusing on how to do X,Y,and Z because they are too many options.

however, if its easy to get at the few features you need, then the other features don't bother them.

How many people use all the features in firefox or opera? All the preferences? They have alot more features than Internet Explorer. However, they are implemented non-intrusively, so it doesn't bother the  users who don't care about them.

This is one of the driving forces behind the plugin-nature of the latest version. 

the core product is not littered with stuff the don't want or tha t95% of users don't want, but they can make extra money with plugins and make conversions form other products happen.

It s a good architecture for that.

I'm not convinced by his Word comparison.
Firstly the reason Word is ubiquitous is that it is effectively free. Work machines come bundled with office licences and the copy protection on Office is/was deliberately weak to allow copies to be 'borrowed' for home.  There is no market for a $50 WP when you already have one, however unsuitable, already installed.

Word isn't suitable for many tasks, as soon as you want to write a screen play, script, large collaborative project document, API documentation etc there is an open field of tools.

no one bug tracker s going to be suitable for a one man development team, a large commercial app and the Linux kernel.

Although Joel referred one competitor, he used the plural when mentioned the plan "to eliminate any possible reason that customers might buy our competitors' junk".

This is indeed a lot of junk in the bug tracking space.

Often sold by smooth salespeople from big companies. PVCS - ugh. Mercury Quality Center (or whatever it's current name is - HP something or other) - ugh.

Often free. Bugzilla - ugh. And so it goes.

Okay, I'm not an MBA, and I haven't run a successful company.  But I'm gonna give you the lowdown on what's wrong.

First, the economy is in the crapper.  Maybe Joel hasn't noticed it, but the truth is that the economy really really stinks right now.  So flat sales are actually pretty good.  I live an hour from Detroit. There are three companies you might have heard of in Detroit who would be thrilled with sales that had been flat for the last couple of years.  Ford and GM are even making good quality products that their owners are happy with.  Their sales still suck, because people are holding on to their old cars.

Second, FogBugz isn't that great.  Yes, it's pretty good.  But Trac is pretty good, and if your revenue is flat you'll cope with its deficiencies, because that's cheaper than laying off an employee to buy tools.  Just like you'll keep driving your old, paid for car because you don't need the payments on a new car, even if the latest model car is really nice.

Third, Joel is thinking like a suit.  If he didn't, they wouldn't let him write for Inc. Joel, if you read this, here's a couple of things you need to do. 

The first thing is to stop writing for Inc.  Nobody who reads that magazine gives a good God Damn about what you do.  You write software for people they hate: programmers.  Programmers cost their readers money. You want to write something, write good columns for your website.  Don't write about business stuff, because programmers don't care about that stuff.  Write about delivering good software.

Second, write some damned code.  Your columns used to be good because you wrote from a programmer's perspective. You haven't written from a programmer's perspective in a long time.  You write about lectures and conventions and cool business deals.  Your customers, they don't care about that stuff.  That's stuff suits do.  Suits aren't useful to a programmer. So quit doing lecture circuits and interviews with hip business magazines and go back to being what your customers need.

I think the real competitor whose unspoken shadow darkens Joel's thoughts is a concept than a company: free (as in "free of charge") software. If you sell software to a user base who are exactly the ones capable of writing their own, you always face the risk that they WILL write their own. And eventually, the free stuff might just get good enough for most people's needs that the paid software market just falls out from under you.

Eclipse has killed the commercial Java IDE market. Even commercial offerings like FlexBuilder are built on top of Eclipse. Even IntelliJ's IDEA is about to go open source now. Most app servers are free, dominated by Tomcat. Lots of developer tools are fully viable and open source, such as Hudson (continuous integration), JUnit/TestNG (unit testing), Subversion/Git/Hg/CVS (version control) and Ant/Maven (build).

Bug tracking is one area where a truly good open source offering (not Bugzilla) is not apparent. But this can change on a dime. Linus Torvald hated every VCS except the commercial Bitkeeper, but shortly after adopting it simply wrote his own (long story). Now it is Linus' Git that people talk about rather than Bitkeeper.

To keep ahead of the open source threat, Joel needs to get Fogbugz out of a merely developer-dominated mindshare into enterprise-space. If your software has the perception of being "enterprise" class, either through sheer weight of features or adoption by the big companies, you can justify being paid for it. Oracle need not worry about justifying their expensive DB over MySQL (which, oops, they also acquired) or Postgresql because Oracle is the safe enterprise solution. Likewise, Fog Creek can move into the enterprise tier by adding features and sales. Which is exactly what Joel said he would do.

"Eclipse has killed the commercial Java IDE market. "

I hope it did not, because it is crap when compared to IntelliJ IDEA. The commercial version of IntelliJ beats both Netbeans and Eclipse (I've tried all three of them, and used both Eclipse and IntelliJ for a long time).

If IntelliJ has to go Open Source (and lose the quality it had) because of the "race to the bottom", it would be a damn shame. I expect that an OS IntelliJ will not be as good as the commercial version, because of how crappy Eclipse and Netbeans are when compared to IntelliJ.

Oh well.

>Ford and GM are even making good quality products that their owners are happy with.

Quality? You are kidding me right? Heck cars from anywhere will last. The problems in the industry are NOT quality right now. It like saying because software never rusts and lasts forever it has good quality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Companies like Ford been on a hiring spree for the last 20 years based on everything but that of hiring the best people. Here is review of their Lincon 2010 MKT. 

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/review-lincoln-mkt-ecoboost/

In fact, after reading the above, one can ONLY hope the vehicle wears out to put the owner out of the misery of driving that product. On the other hand, It might have enough quality to last for hundred years.

For example, if you said you wanted to get into the cell phone market right now I would say you are crazy. Those established companies been in that market for almost 30 years. They’re multibillion dollar companies, and I would tell you right now it’s pretty darn near possible to break into the longtime established market.

On the other hand Apple walked in and roasted the pants off of Nokia, Motorola, Simmonds, and several MORE multibillion dollar companies. And, Apple proceeded to still the whole smart phone market. People don’t seem to understand, is not the fact that they made a GREAT phone. The BIG story is that they walked into a 30 year long time establish marketplace that’s nearly impossible to break into. The walked in with no prior experience and simply blew the doors of everybody else.

Sony’s name was synonymous with a Walkman and portable music at one time. Even more incredible is Sony decided that they’re going to purchase and get into the music side of the business. A very SMART move, and it would mean that they would not be just that building VCRs and walkmans. They would also own the content and music that they plan to sell. Sony is a company that also owns perhaps the best consumer product division and the ability to manufacture products is SECOND TO NONE anywhere on planet earth.

Yet a company without a music or record company, a company without manufacturing ability, a company that really had little if any presence in the consumer product marketplace walked right in and stole the whole portable music market player to themselves. In fact apple is now the largest distributor of music.

Apple surpassed the competition with ease. Apple is now a larger music distribution company then Sony is! The case you don’t’ grasp what I’m saying, that music distribution system that apple owns is worth FAR more than their iPods.

So you can’t tell me when it comes to cars, computers, cell phones, or software, or moves that having great people is the DECIDING factor right now.

In fact more than ever, now’s the time when you need great people so that you can actually even grow in a bad economy.

In fact today people who have money ARE buying great products. If you don’t hire great people then you wind up spending enormous amounts of money making a product such as that Lincoln that is NOT going to sell. The real said problem is building a product like that Lincoln means that you’ve wasted enormous amounts of money. Often you’ll not get a second chance in the marketplace or to win those consumers over. 

Just go ask what the managers at WordPerfect did and how they destroyed a fantastic product. They eventually ran out of money and they could not compete in the marketplace, the same goes for those automobile companies and they can NOT NOW afford to hire dumb people and come out with a crap product. And when I say crap product, we’re not talking about quality in terms of longevity, because a crap product these days is built well enough to last a 100 years.

Creating cell phones, cars, or software, or even for that matter movies are all very much the same today. Good high quality talent will win you win the marketplace, and there’s no substitute.  If you look at the top selling cars (not trucks or SUV) right now for July 2009, what do you see?

Toyota Camry: 33,974
Honda Civic: 30,037
Honda Accord: 29,774
Toyota Corolla: 29,593
Ford Focus: 21,830
Nissan Altima: 19,252
Toyota Prius: 19,173

Looking at the above numbers, some of those factories are likely running a second and perhaps even 3rd shifts. Anything at 20,000 units per month means that that factory’s humming along at near capacity and cranking out cars at an fantastic rate.

These cars despite the recession are selling VERY well. Where is GM? Where is Chrysler? Oh, one Ford in the above list? Untill they change their Culture and hiring practices, they will not rebound in the marketplace

What some of these automobile companies need to do who start hiring people like Steve jobs or even me. Now’s the time for hiring brilliant intellectual elites in society because we’re the ones that can build you great products.

If you don’t think great people don’t make a difference, then have to come up with a really amazing explanation as to how apple walked into some several URTRA competitive marketplaces and simply roasted the competition. You think windows mobile is Competing with Apple? The exact same lesson in life applies to the above list of cars that are selling well.

It very simple that hiring great People and building great products is a clear formula for success, especially in this current economy we have right now.

Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com

As normal, Albert, your arrogance and the shallowness of your knowledge leave me amazed.

Having great people won't save Joel's business. It's important, but not everything. He needs to get back to being one of those exceptional people himself. He's probably a great guy, a good person to work for. But the public persona we're seeing through his blog now, he's not a programmer, and he hasn't been a programmer for a long time. That's the problem.  That's why these forums are dead.  And it's part of why his sales have been flat.  Like the auto executives, he's lost touch with his true customers.

I don’t get you response here? Are you telling me that great people don’t make a difference, and then  you complain about someone’s who  not being great by your standards?

So not being great don’t matter, but you standing here complaining about someone (Joel) not being great?

Which is it here?

>Having great people won't save Joel's business. It's important, but not everything.

Well, ok, then I guess we see this view very different. I think great people makes all the difference.

John Schully was CEO of Pepsi and ran Pepsi quite well for years. When he went to apple he was now faced with an industry based where talent makes MORE of a difference. That supposed smart businessman ran Apple into right into the ground, and into near bankruptcy.

We saw the same with WordPerfect, and we see the same in the Auto Industry. (did you bother to read that Lincoln review -- it is a joke and it CLEAR that they need to change the people they have!).

So, yes, I really do believe that great people make the difference and if you don’t have those people, then you not even be debating if the product is good. In fact you not be making any products and not working! So, then you have nothing at all to debate about. So, the way I see this everything is based on talent...

Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com

If Christopher Wong is right and Joel needs to get into enterprise sales, then the answer is easy: stop talking about bugs.

Programmers have bugs. Customers have issues. Companies have projects, features, and enhancements.

FogBugz can handle all of these things but the name says it is just about bugs. Who needs evidence-based scheduling for a bug fix? Or project management or request tracking?

Joel's problem is marketing, not sales.

The forum's are dead because he made login required and he created stackoverflow.

The real question is: How'd stackoverflow doin'?

"If IntelliJ has to go Open Source (and lose the quality it had) because of the "race to the bottom", it would be a damn shame. I expect that an OS IntelliJ will not be as good as the commercial version, because of how crappy Eclipse and Netbeans are when compared to IntelliJ."

So if they sprinkle the magic OS fairy dust on it, the suckitude will grow like flowers?

Really, I don't understand the thinking behind your comment. How does taking a successful, high-quality product, and showing people the source code, make it suddenly lose its quality?

Oh wait, you're one of those guys who thinks "anyone can submit a change" means "everyone's changes are accepted".