2002/01/31

This is one of those days where I could write a comment that says:

maybe it's easier to do this at eval time.
We could tag the foreach onto the malkovitch.

and it would actually make sense.

What is Six Degrees?

When software companies say that "their capital assets go home every night," they are serious. Dead serious. And when Quark goes down in flames because the bean-counters pushed out the experienced developers and hired new, cheaper ones 10 time zones away, there will be a great case study in Harvard Business Review to prove it.

There are not a lot of software companies to work for in Denver. So when the key designers of QuarkXPress 5.0 got sick of being treated like interchangable code slaves, they started their own shop and quickly sold it to a smart Vancouver-based company that wrote them a blank check and let them stay in their hometown.

What they came up with is nothing short of a breakthrough in the field of personal knowledge management, an effervescent field that has not quite made it onto the radar of the buzzword maniacs. Six Degrees is gonna be Google for the desktop.  Everywhere I look I see people blabbing about how they're going to crack the knowledge management nut. It's like 7 years ago when everybody was making a search engine. But only Larry and Sergey figured out the formula to make search actually work, and only Mark, David, Cameron and Zach figured out the formula for to make knowledge management actually work. This is cool stuff. Ship it already, dammit, I need it yesterday!

My new book is here! Apress has just published a new collection of 36 essays from Joel on Software, aptly named More Joel on Software. Get yours today! Available from Amazon.com or wherever fine cheese is sold.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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