Joel on Software

2002/08/19

CNet catches up: "Microsoft's public handling of .Net could stand as a case study in what not to do in a high-profile marketing campaign." I wrote about this two years ago in an oft-misinterpreted article. My beef was that .NET was just marketing gone crazy, it wasn't a criticism of any particular piece of technology that got the .NET moniker stuck on it. And I also claimed that .NET was not revolutionary, but rather a new name for things that were under development anyway, although in retrospect I'm pretty impressed by just what a big step forward the languages and development tools took.

Jakob Nielsen, nattering nabob of negativity, writes: "Tiny text tyrannizes users..." (hear, hear!)

CityDesk News: "What Jakob is really complaining about is that Windows versions of IE do not give the user the ability to change the font size when the designer has specified an exact pixel size using CSS."

Christian made an awesome CityDesk demo for us using Flash in exchange for an Aeron chair. Tell me what you think.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracker designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, Kiln, which simplifies source control and code review, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop control easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.