Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empire will topple.”

Although there is some truth to the fact that Linux is a huge threat to Microsoft, predictions of the Redmond company’s demise are, to say the least, premature. Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off. In the early 90s everyone thought IBM was completely over: mainframes were history! Back then, Robert X. Cringely predicted that the era of the mainframe would end on January 1, 2000 when all the applications written in COBOL would seize up, and rather than fix those applications, for which, allegedly, the source code had long since been lost, everybody would rewrite those applications for client-server platforms.

Well, guess what. Mainframes are still with us,  nothing happened on January 1, 2000, and IBM reinvented itself as a big ol’ technology consulting company that also happens to make cheap plastic telephones. So extrapolating from a few data points to the theory that Microsoft is finished is really quite a severe exaggeration.

However, there is a less understood phenomenon which is going largely unnoticed: Microsoft’s crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft’s monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft’s income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API  is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.

Now that I’ve said that, allow me to apologize for the grandiloquence and pomposity of that preceding paragraph. I think I’m starting to sound like those editorial writers in the trade rags who go on and on about Microsoft’s strategic asset, the Windows API. It’s going to take me a few pages, here, to explain what I’m really talking about and justify my arguments. Please don’t jump to any conclusions until I explain what I’m talking about. This will be a long article. I need to explain what the Windows API is; I need to demonstrate why it’s the most important strategic asset to Microsoft; I need to explain how it was lost and what the implications of that are in the long term. And because I’m talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize.

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers

Remember the definition of an operating system? It’s the thing that manages a computer’s resources so that application programs can run. People don’t really care much about operating systems; they care about those application programs that the operating system makes possible. Word Processors. Instant Messaging. Email. Accounts Payable. Web sites with pictures of Paris Hilton. By itself, an operating system is not that useful. People buy operating systems because of the useful applications that run on it. And therefore the most useful operating system is the one that has the most useful applications.

The logical conclusion of this is that if you’re trying to sell operating systems, the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software for your operating system. That’s why Steve Ballmer was jumping around the stage shouting “Developers, developers, developers, developers.” It’s so important for Microsoft that the only reason they don’t outright give away development tools for Windows is because they don’t want to inadvertently cut off the oxygen to competitive development tools vendors (well, those that are left) because having a variety of development tools available for their platform makes it that much more attractive to developers. But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime… also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland.

Why Apple and Sun Can’t Sell Computers

Well, of course, that’s a little bit silly: of course Apple and Sun can sell computers, but not to the two most lucrative markets for computers, namely, the corporate desktop and the home computer. Apple is still down there in the very low single digits of market share and the only people with Suns on their desktops are at Sun. (Please understand that I’m talking about large trends here, and therefore when I say things like “nobody” I really mean “fewer than 10,000,000 people,” and so on and so forth.)

Why? Because Apple and Sun computers don’t run Windows programs, or, if they do, it’s in some kind of expensive emulation mode that doesn’t work so great. Remember, people buy computers for the applications that they run, and there’s so much more great desktop software available for Windows than Mac that it’s very hard to be a Mac user.

Sidebar What is this “API” thing?

If you’re writing a program, say, a word processor, and you want to display a menu, or write a file, you have to ask the operating system to do it for you, using a very specific set of function calls which are different on every operating system. These function calls are called the API: it’s the interface that an operating system, like Windows, provides to application developers, like the programmers building word processors and spreadsheets and whatnot. It’s a set of thousands and thousands of detailed and fussy functions and subroutines that programmers can use, which cause the operating system to do interesting things like display a menu, read and write files, and more esoteric things like find out how to spell out a given date in Serbian, or extremely complex things like display a web page in a window. If your program uses the API calls for Windows, it’s not going to work on Linux, which has different API calls. Sometimes they do approximately the same thing. That’s one important reason Windows software doesn’t run on Linux. If you wanted to get a Windows program to run under Linux, you’d have to reimplement the entire Windows API, which consists of thousands of complicated functions: this is almost as much work as implementing Windows itself, something which took Microsoft thousands of person-years. And if you make one tiny mistake or leave out one function that an application needs, that application will crash.

And that’s why the Windows API is such an important asset to Microsoft.

(I know, I know, at this point the 2.3% of the world that uses Macintoshes are warming up their email programs to send me a scathing letter about how much they love their Macs. Once again, I’m speaking in large trends and generalizing, so don’t waste your time. I know you love your Mac. I know it runs everything you need. I love you, you’re a Pepper, but you’re only 2.3% of the world, so this article isn’t about you.)

The Two Forces at Microsoft

There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp.

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He’s been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons.

The most impressive things to read on Raymond’s weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility:

Look at the scenario from the customer’s standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn’t work at all. You’re going to tell your friends, “Don’t upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it’s not compatible with program Z.” Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn’t work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You’re going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1. In fact if you poke around in the AppCompatibility section of your registry you’ll see a whole list of applications that Windows treats specially, emulating various old bugs and quirky behaviors so they’ll continue to work. Raymond Chen writes, “I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.”

A lot of developers and engineers don’t agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It’s why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work. For example, a lot of developers used to try to make their Macintosh applications run faster by copying pointers out of the jump table and calling them directly instead of using the interrupt feature of the processor like they were supposed to. Even though somewhere in Inside Macintosh, Apple’s official Bible of Macintosh programming, there was a tech note saying “you can’t do this,” they did it, and it worked, and their programs ran faster… until the next version of the OS came out and they didn’t run at all. If the company that made the application went out of business (and most of them did), well, tough luck, bubby.

To contrast, I’ve got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft. I know, it’s not just Raymond, of course: it’s the whole modus operandi of the core Windows API team. But Raymond has publicized it the most through his excellent website The Old New Thing so I’ll name it after him.

That’s one camp. The other camp is what I’m going to call the MSDN Magazine camp, which I will name after the developer’s magazine full of exciting articles about all the different ways you can shoot yourself in the foot by using esoteric combinations of Microsoft products in your own software. The MSDN Magazine Camp is always trying to convince you to use new and complicated external technology like COM+, MSMQ, MSDE, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and its components, MSXML, DirectX (the very latest version, please), Windows Media Player, and Sharepoint… Sharepoint! which nobody has; a veritable panoply of external dependencies each one of which is going to be a huge headache when you ship your application to a paying customer and it doesn’t work right. The technical name for this is DLL Hell. It works here: why doesn’t it work there?

The Raymond Chen Camp believes in making things easy for developers by making it easy to write once and run anywhere (well, on any Windows box). The MSDN Magazine Camp believes in making things easy for developers by giving them really powerful chunks of code which they can leverage, if they are willing to pay the price of incredibly complicated deployment and installation headaches, not to mention the huge learning curve. The Raymond Chen camp is all about consolidation. Please, don’t make things any worse, let’s just keep making what we already have still work. The MSDN Magazine Camp needs to keep churning out new gigantic pieces of technology that nobody can keep up with.

Here’s why this matters.

Microsoft Lost the Backwards Compatibility Religion

Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle.

The first big win was making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product.

And the sky didn’t seem to fall, not inside Microsoft. VB6 developers were up in arms, but they were disappearing anyway, because most of them were corporate developers who were migrating to web development anyway. The real long term damage was hidden.

With this major victory under their belts, the MSDN Magazine Camp took over. Suddenly it was OK to change things. IIS 6.0 came out with a different threading model that broke some old applications. I was shocked to discover that our customers with Windows Server 2003 were having trouble running FogBugz. Then .NET 1.1 was not perfectly backwards compatible with 1.0. And now that the cat was out of the bag, the OS team got into the spirit and decided that instead of adding features to the Windows API, they were going to completely replace it. Instead of Win32, we are told, we should now start getting ready for WinFX: the next generation Windows API. All different. Based on .NET with managed code. XAML. Avalon. Yes, vastly superior to Win32, I admit it. But not an upgrade: a break with the past.

Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en-masse and are now developing for the web. Paul Graham, who created Yahoo! Stores in the early days of the dotcom boom, summarized it eloquently: “There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft’s terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.”

Microsoft got big enough, with too many developers, and they were too addicted to upgrade revenues, so they suddenly decided that reinventing everything was not too big a project. Heck, we can do it twice. The old Microsoft, the Microsoft of Raymond Chen, might have implemented things like Avalon, the new graphics system, as a series of DLLs that can run on any version of Windows and which could be bundled with applications that need them. There’s no technical reason not to do this. But Microsoft needs to give you a reason to buy Longhorn, and what they’re trying to pull off is a sea change, similar to the sea change that occurred when Windows replaced DOS. The trouble is that Longhorn is not a very big advance over Windows XP; not nearly as big as Windows was over DOS. It probably won’t be compelling enough to get people to buy all new computers and applications like they did for Windows. Well, maybe it will, Microsoft certainly needs it to be, but what I’ve seen so far is not very convincing. A lot of the bets Microsoft made are the wrong ones. For example, WinFS, advertised as a way to make searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making searching work. Don’t make me type metadata for all my files that I can search using a query language. Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973.

Automatic Transmissions Win the Day

Don’t get me wrong… I think .NET is a great development environment and Avalon with XAML is a tremendous advance over the old way of writing GUI apps for Windows. The biggest advantage of .NET is the fact that it has automatic memory management.

A lot of us thought in the 1990s that the big battle would be between procedural and object oriented programming, and we thought that object oriented programming would provide a big boost in programmer productivity. I thought that, too. Some people still think that. It turns out we were wrong. Object oriented programming is handy dandy, but it’s not really the productivity booster that was promised. The real significant productivity advance we’ve had in programming has been from languages which manage memory for you automatically. It can be with reference counting or garbage collection; it can be Java, Lisp, Visual Basic (even 1.0), Smalltalk, or any of a number of scripting languages. If your programming language allows you to grab a chunk of memory without thinking about how it’s going to be released when you’re done with it, you’re using a managed-memory language, and you are going to be much more efficient than someone using a language in which you have to explicitly manage memory. Whenever you hear someone bragging about how productive their language is, they’re probably getting most of that productivity from the automated memory management, even if they misattribute it.

Sidebar
Why does automatic memory management make you so much more productive? 1) Because you can write f(g(x)) without worrying about how to free the return value from g, which means you can use functions which return interesting complex data types and functions which transform interesting complex data types, in turn allowing you to work at a higher level of abstraction. 2) Because you don’t have to spend any time writing code to free memory or tracking down memory leaks. 3) Because you don’t have to carefully coordinate the exit points from your functions to make sure things are cleaned up properly.

Racing car aficionados will probably send me hate mail for this, but my experience has been that there is only one case, in normal driving, where a good automatic transmission is inferior to a manual transmission. Similarly in software development: in almost every case, automatic memory management is superior to manual memory management and results in far greater programmer productivity.

If you were developing desktop applications in the early years of Windows, Microsoft offered you two ways to do it: writing C code which calls the Windows API directly and managing your own memory, or using Visual Basic and getting your memory managed for you. These are the two development environments I have used the most, personally, over the last 13 years or so, and I know them inside-out, and my experience has been that Visual Basic is significantly more productive. Often I’ve written the same code, once in C++ calling the Windows API and once in Visual Basic, and C++ always took three or four times as much work. Why? Memory management. The easiest way to see why is to look at the documentation for any Windows API function that needs to return a string. Look closely at how much discussion there is around the concept of who allocates the memory for the string, and how you negotiate how much memory will be needed. Typically, you have to call the function twice—on the first call, you tell it that you’ve allocated zero bytes, and it fails with a “not enough memory allocated” message and conveniently also tells you how much memory you need to allocate. That’s if you’re lucky enough not to be calling a function which returns a list of strings or a whole variable-length structure. In any case, simple operations like opening a file, writing a string, and closing it using the raw Windows API can take a page of code. In Visual Basic similar operations can take three lines.

So, you’ve got these two programming worlds. Everyone has pretty much decided that the world of managed code is far superior to the world of unmanaged code. Visual Basic was (and probably remains) the number one bestselling language product of all time and developers preferred it over C or C++ for Windows development, although the fact that “Basic” was in the name of the product made hardcore programmers shun it even though it was a fairly modern language with a handful of object-oriented features and very little leftover gunk (line numbers and the LET statement having gone the way of the hula hoop). The other problem with VB was that deployment required shipping a VB runtime, which was a big deal for shareware distributed over modems, and, worse, let other programmers see that your application was developed in (the shame!) Visual Basic.

One Runtime To Rule Them All

And along came .NET. This was a grand project, the super-duper unifying project to clean up the whole mess once and for all. It would have memory management, of course. It would still have Visual Basic, but it would gain a new language, one which is in spirit virtually the same as Visual Basic but with the C-like syntax of curly braces and semicolons. And best of all, the new Visual Basic/C hybrid would be called Visual C#, so you would not have to tell anyone you were a “Basic” programmer any more. All those horrid Windows functions with their tails and hooks and backwards-compatibility bugs and impossible-to-figure-out string-returning semantics would be wiped out, replaced by a single clean object oriented interface that only has one kind of string. One runtime to rule them all. It was beautiful. And they pulled it off, technically. .NET is a great programming environment that manages your memory and has a rich, complete, and consistent interface to the operating system and a rich, super complete, and elegant object library for basic operations.

And yet, people aren’t really using .NET much.

Oh sure, some of them are.

But the idea of unifying the mess of Visual Basic and Windows API programming by creating a completely new, ground-up programming environment with not one, not two, but three languages (or are there four?) is sort of like the idea of getting two quarreling kids to stop arguing by shouting “shut up!” louder than either of them. It only works on TV. In real life when you shout “shut up!” to two people arguing loudly you just create a louder three-way argument.

(By the way, for those of you who follow the arcane but politically-charged world of blog syndication feed formats, you can see the same thing happening over there. RSS became fragmented with several different versions, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting, and the attempt to clean everything up by creating yet another format called Atom has resulted in several different versions of RSS plus one version of Atom, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting. When you try to unify two opposing forces by creating a third alternative, you just end up with three opposing forces. You haven’t unified anything and you haven’t really fixed anything.)

So now instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way mess, with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to use and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to .NET.

No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message (“just use .NET—trust us!”), most of their customers are still using C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on a Windows server but don’t require Windows clients, which is a key point I’ll talk about more when I talk about the web.

Oh, Wait, There’s More Coming!

Now Microsoft has so many developers cranking away that it’s not enough to reinvent the entire Windows API: they have to reinvent it twice. At last year’s PDC they preannounced the next major version of their operating system, codenamed Longhorn, which will contain, among other things, a completely new user interface API, codenamed Avalon, rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of modern computers’ fast display adapters and realtime 3D rendering. And if you’re developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft’s “official” latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment, WinForms, you’re going to have to start over again in two years to support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely stillborn. Hope you haven’t invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a slide from Microsoft labelled “How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and Avalon?” and asks, “Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and Avalon?” A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer.

So you’ve got the Windows API, you’ve got VB, and now you’ve got .NET, in several language flavors, and don’t get too attached to any of that, because we’re making Avalon, you see, which will only run on the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a loooong time. And personally I still haven’t had time to learn .NET very deeply, and we haven’t ported Fog Creek’s two applications from classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there’s no return on investment for us. None. It’s just Fire and Motion as far as I’m concerned: Microsoft would love for me to stop adding new features to our bug tracking software and content management software and instead waste a few months porting it to another programming environment, something which will not benefit a single customer and therefore will not gain us one additional sale, and therefore which is a complete waste of several months, which is great for Microsoft, because they have content management software and bug tracking software, too, so they’d like nothing better than for me to waste time spinning cycles catching up with the flavor du jour, and then waste another year or two doing an Avalon version, too, while they add features to their own competitive software. Riiiight.

No developer with a day job has time to keep up with all the new development tools coming out of Redmond, if only because there are too many dang employees at Microsoft making development tools!

It’s Not 1990

Microsoft grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, when the growth in personal computers was so dramatic that every year there were more new computers sold than the entire installed base. That meant that if you made a product that only worked on new computers, within a year or two it could take over the world even if nobody switched to your product. That was one of the reasons Word and Excel displaced WordPerfect and Lotus so thoroughly: Microsoft just waited for the next big wave of hardware upgrades and sold Windows, Word and Excel to corporations buying their next round of desktop computers (in some cases their first round). So in many ways Microsoft never needed to learn how to get an installed base to switch from product N to product N+1. When people get new computers, they’re happy to get all the latest Microsoft stuff on the new computer, but they’re far less likely to upgrade. This didn’t matter when the PC industry was growing like wildfire, but now that the world is saturated with PCs most of which are Just Fine, Thank You, Microsoft is suddenly realizing that it takes much longer for the latest thing to get out there. When they tried to “End Of Life” Windows 98, it turned out there were still so many people using it they had to promise to support that old creaking grandma for a few more years.

Unfortunately, these Brave New Strategies, things like .NET and Longhorn and Avalon, trying to create a new API to lock people into, can’t work very well if everybody is still using their good-enough computers from 1998. Even if Longhorn ships when it’s supposed to, in 2006, which I don’t believe for a minute, it will take a couple of years before enough people have it that it’s even worth considering as a development platform. Developers, developers, developers, and developers are not buying into Microsoft’s multiple-personality-disordered suggestions for how we should develop software.

Enter the Web

I’m not sure how I managed to get this far without mentioning the Web. Every developer has a choice to make when they plan a new software application: they can build it for the web or they can build a “rich client” application that runs on PCs. The basic pros and cons are simple: Web applications are easier to deploy, while rich clients offer faster response time enabling much more interesting user interfaces.

Web Applications are easier to deploy because there’s no installation involved. Installing a web application means typing a URL in the address bar. Today I installed Google’s new email application by typing Alt+D, gmail, Ctrl+Enter. There are far fewer compatibility problems and problems coexisting with other software. Every user of your product is using the same version so you never have to support a mix of old versions. You can use any programming environment you want because you only have to get it up and running on your own server. Your application is automatically available at virtually every reasonable computer on the planet. Your customers’ data, too, is automatically available at virtually every reasonable computer on the planet.

But there’s a price to pay in the smoothness of the user interface. Here are a few examples of things you can’t really do well in a web application:

1. Create a fast drawing program
2. Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
3. Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
4. Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
5. Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn’t require the mouse
6. Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet

These are not all big issues. Some of them will be solved very soon by witty Javascript developers. Two new web applications, Gmail and Oddpost, both email apps, do a really decent job of working around or completely solving some of these issues. And users don’t seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer.

So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it’s certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft’s API doesn’t matter so much. Web applications don’t require Windows.

It’s not that Microsoft didn’t notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: “Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.” You’ll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that “Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft’s stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We’re investing on the desktop, we think it’s a good place to be, and we hope we’re going to start a wave of excitement…”

The trouble is: it’s too late.

I’m a Little Bit Sad About This, Myself

I’m actually a little bit sad about this, myself. To me the Web is great but Web-based applications with their sucky, high-latency, inconsistent user interfaces are a huge step backwards in daily usability. I love my rich client applications and would go nuts if I had to use web versions of the applications I use daily: Visual Studio, CityDesk, Outlook, Corel PhotoPaint, QuickBooks. But that’s what developers are going to give us. Nobody (by which, again, I mean “fewer than 10,000,000 people”) wants to develop for the Windows API any more. Venture Capitalists won’t invest in Windows applications because they’re so afraid of competition from Microsoft. And most users don’t seem to care about crappy Web UIs as much as I do.

And here’s the clincher: I noticed (and confirmed this with a recruiter friend) that Windows API programmers here in New York City who know C++ and COM programming earn about $130,000 a year, while typical Web programmers using managed code languages (Java, PHP, Perl, even ASP.NET) earn about $80,000 a year. That’s a huge difference, and when I talked to some friends from Microsoft Consulting Services about this they admitted that Microsoft had lost a whole generation of developers. The reason it takes $130,000 to hire someone with COM experience is because nobody bothered learning COM programming in the last eight years or so, so you have to find somebody really senior, usually they’re already in management, and convince them to take a job as a grunt programmer, dealing with (God help me) marshalling and monikers and apartment threading and aggregates and tearoffs and a million other things that, basically, only Don Box ever understood, and even Don Box can’t bear to look at them any more.

Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft’s web server. ASP.NET is brilliant; I’ve been working with web development for ten years and it’s really just a generation ahead of everything out there. But it’s a server technology, so clients can use any kind of desktop they want. And it runs pretty well under Linux using Mono.

None of this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.

Sometimes I just can’t get anything done.

Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American Express bill. But getting back into the flow of writing code just doesn’t happen.

These bouts of unproductiveness usually last for a day or two. But there have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I’m not in flow. I’m not in the zone. I’m not anywhere.

Everybody has mood swings; for some people they are mild, for others, they can be more pronounced or even dysfunctional. And the unproductive periods do seem to correlate somewhat with gloomier moods.

It makes me think of those researchers who say that basically people can’t control what they eat, so any attempt to diet is bound to be short term and they will always yoyo back to their natural weight. Maybe as a software developer I really can’t control when I’m productive, and I just have to take the slow times with the fast times and hope that they average out to enough lines of code to make me employable.

What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I’ve realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding. When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true. I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I’ve always been one of the most productive members of the team. That’s probably why when Peopleware and XP insist on eliminating overtime and working strictly 40 hour weeks, they do so secure in the knowledge that this won’t reduce a team’s output.

But it’s not the days when I “only” get two hours of work done that worry me. It’s the days when I can’t do anything.

I’ve thought about this a lot. I tried to remember the time when I got the most work done in my career. It was probably when Microsoft moved me into a beautiful, plush new office with large picture windows overlooking a pretty stone courtyard full of cherry trees in bloom. Everything was clicking. For months I worked nonstop grinding out the detailed specification for Excel Basic — a monumental ream of paper going into incredible detail covering a gigantic object model and programming environment. I literally never stopped. When I had to go to Boston for MacWorld I took a laptop with me, and documented the Window class sitting on a pleasant terrace at HBS.

Once you get into flow it’s not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I’ve got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don’t realize that it’s already 7:30 pm.

Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can’t always make it across that chasm. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There’s something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it’s rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going. Like a bicycle decked out for a cross-country, self-supported bike trip — when you first start riding a bike with all that gear, it’s hard to believe how much work it takes to get rolling, but once you are rolling, it feels just as easy as riding a bike without any gear.

Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started.

When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can’t fire at you. (That’s what the soldiers mean when they shout “cover me.” It means, “fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can’t fire at me while I run across this street, here.” It works.)  The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you’re not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you’re not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Hailstorm? SOAP? RDF? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond? The sales teams of the big companies understand cover fire. They go into their customers and say, “OK, you don’t have to buy from us. Buy from the best vendor. But make sure that you get a product that supports (XML / SOAP / CDE / J2EE) because otherwise you’ll be Locked In The Trunk.” Then when the little companies try to sell into that account, all they hear is obedient CTOs parrotting “Do you have J2EE?” And they have to waste all their time building in J2EE even if it doesn’t really make any sales, and gives them no opportunity to distinguish themselves. It’s a checkbox feature — you do it because you need the checkbox saying you have it, but nobody will use it or needs it. And it’s cover fire.

Fire and Motion, for small companies like mine, means two things. You have to have time on your side, and you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win. All I managed to do yesterday is improve the color scheme in FogBUGZ just a little bit. That’s OK. It’s getting better all the time. Every day our software is better and better and we have more and more customers and that’s all that matters. Until we’re a company the size of Oracle, we don’t have to think about grand strategies. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’re in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or you’re going to have a disaster on your hands.

The decision? Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital.

The organic model is to start small, with limited goals, and slowly build a business over a long period of time. I’m going to call this the Ben and Jerry’s model, because Ben and Jerry’s fits this model pretty well.

The other model, popularly called “Get Big Fast” (a.k.a. “Land Grab”), requires you to raise a lot of capital, and work as quickly as possible to get big fast without concern for profitability. I’m going to call this the Amazon model, because Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has practically become the celebrity spokesmodel for Get Big Fast.

Let’s look at some of the differences between these models. The first thing to ask is: are you going into a business that has competition, or not?

Ben and Jerry’s	Amazon
Lots of established competitors	New technology, no competition at first

If you don’t have any real competition, like Amazon, there is a chance that you can succeed at a “land grab”, that is, get as many customers as quickly as possible, so that later competitors will have a serious barrier to entry. But if you’re going into an industry where there is already a well-established set of competitors, the land-grab idea doesn’t make sense. You need to create your customer base by getting customers to switch over from competitors. 

In general, venture capitalists aren’t too enthusiastic about the idea of going into a market with pesky competitors. Personally, I’m not so scared of established competition; perhaps because I worked on Microsoft Excel during a period when it almost completely took over Lotus 123, which virtually had the market to themselves. The number one word processor, Word, displaced WordPerfect, which displaced WordStar, all of which had been near monopolies at one time or another. And Ben and Jerry’s grew to be a fabulous business, even though it’s not like you couldn’t get ice cream before they came along. It’s not impossible to displace a competitor, if that’s what you want to do. (I’ll talk about how to do that in a future Strategy Letter).

Another question about displacing competitors has to do with network effects and lock-in:

Ben and Jerry’s	Amazon
No network effect; weak customer lock-in	Strong network effect, strong customer lock-in

A “network effect” is a situation where the more customers you have, the more customers you will get. It’s based on Metcalfe’s Law: the value of a network is equal to the number of users squared.

A good example is eBay. If you want to sell your old Patek Philippe watch, you’re going to get a better price on eBay, because there are more buyers there. If you want to buy a Patek Philippe watch, you’re going to look on eBay, because there are more sellers there.

Another extremely strong network effect is proprietary chat systems like ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger. If you want to chat with people, you have to go where they are, and ICQ and AOL have the most people by far. Chances are, your friends are using one of those services, not one of the smaller ones like MSN Instant Messenger. With all of Microsoft’s muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong.

“Lock-in” is where there is something about the business that makes people not want to switch. Nobody wants to switch their Internet provider, even if the service isn’t very good, because of the hassle of changing your email address and notifying everyone of the new email address. People don’t want to switch word processors if their old files can’t be read by the new word processor.

Even better than lock-in is the sneaky version I call stealth lock-in: services which lock you in without your even realizing it. For example, all those new services like PayMyBills.com which receive your bills for you, scan them in, and show them to you on the Internet. They usually come with three months free service. But when the three months are up, if you don’t want to continue with the service, you have no choice but to contact every single bill provider and ask them to change the billing address back to your house. The sheer chore of doing this is likely to prevent you from switching away from PayMyBills.com — better just to let them keep sucking $8.95 out of your bank account every month. Gotcha!

If you are going into a business that has natural network effects and lock-in, and there are no established competitors, then you better use the Amazon model, or somebody else will, and you simply won’t be able to get a toehold.

Quick case study. In 1998, AOL was spending massively to grow at a rate of a million customers every five weeks.  AOL has nice features like chat rooms and instant messaging that provide stealth lock-in. Once you’ve found a group of friends you like to chat with, you are simply not going to switch Internet providers. That’s like trying to get all new  friends. In my mind that’s the key reason that AOL can charge around $22 a month when there are plenty of $10 a month Internet providers. 

While I was working at Juno, management just failed to understand this point, and they missed their best opportunity to overtake AOL during a land rush when everyone was coming online: they didn’t spend strongly enough on customer acquisition because they didn’t want to dilute existing shareholders by raising more capital, and they didn’t think strategically about chat and IM, so they never developed any software features to provide the kind of stealth lock-in that AOL has. Now Juno has around 3 million people paying them an average of $5.50 a month, while AOL has around 21 million people paying them an average of $17 a month. “Oops.”

Ben and Jerry’s	Amazon
Little capital required; break even fast	Outrageous amounts of capital required; profitability can take years

Ben and Jerry’s companies start on somebody’s credit card. In their early months and years, they have to use a business model that becomes profitable extremely quickly, which may not be the ultimate business model that they want to achieve. For example, you may want to become a giant ice cream company with $200,000,000 in annual sales, but for now, you’re going to have to settle for opening a little ice cream shop in Vermont, hope that it’s profitable, and, if it is, reinvest the profits to expand business steadily. The Ben and Jerry’s corporate history says they started with a $12,000 investment. ArsDigita says that they started with an $11,000 investment. These numbers sound like a typical MasterCard credit limit. Hmmm.

Amazon companies raise money practically as fast as anyone can spend it. There’s a reason for this. They are in a terrible rush. If they are in a business with no competitors and network effects, they better get big super-fast. Every day matters. And there are lots of ways to substitute money for time (see sidebar). Nearly all of them are fun.

Ben and Jerry’s companies just can’t afford to do this, so they have to settle for growing slowly.

Ben and Jerry’s	Amazon
Corporate culture is important	Corporate culture is impossible

When you are growing faster than about 100% per year, it is simply impossible for mentors to transmit corporate values to new hires. If a programmer is promoted to manager and suddenly has 5 new reports, hired just yesterday, it is simply impossible for there to be very much mentoring. Netscape is the most egregious example of this, growing from 5 to about 2000 programmers in one year. As a result, their culture was a mishmash of different people with different values about the company, all tugging in different directions.

For some companies, this might be OK. For other companies, the corporate culture is an important part of the raison-d’être of the company. Ben and Jerry’s exists because of the values of the founders, who would not accept growing faster than the rate at which that culture can be promulgated. 

Let’s take a hypothetical software example. Suppose you want to break into the market for word processors. Now, this market seems to be pretty sewn up by Microsoft, but you see a niche for people who, for whatever reason, absolutely cannot have their word processors crashing on them. You are going to make a super-robust, industrial strength word processor that just won’t go down and sell it at a premium to people who simply depend on word processors for their lives. (OK, it’s a stretch. I said this was a hypothetical example).

Now, your corporate culture probably includes all kinds of techniques for writing highly-robust code: unit testing, formal code reviews, coding conventions, large QA departments, and so on. These techniques are not trivial; they must be learned over a period of time. While a new programmer is learning how to write robust code, they need to be mentored and coached by someone more experienced.

As soon as you try to grow so fast that mentoring and coaching is impossible, you are simply going to stop transmitting those values. New hires won’t know better and will write unreliable code. They won’t check the return value from malloc(), and their code will fail in some bizarre case that they never thought about, and nobody will have time to review their code and teach them the right way to do it, and your entire competitive advantage over Microsoft Word has been squandered.

Ben and Jerry’s	Amazon
Mistakes become valuable lessons	Mistakes are not really noticed

A company that is growing too fast will simply not notice when it makes a big mistake, especially of the spend-too-much-money kind. Amazon buys Junglee, a comparison shopping service, for around $180,000,000 in stock, and then suddenly realizes that comparison shopping services are not very good for their business, so they just shut it down. Having piles and piles of cash makes stupid mistakes easy to cover up.

Ben and Jerry’s	Amazon
It takes a long time to get big	You get big very fast

Getting big fast gives the impression (if not the reality) of being successful. When prospective employees see that you’re hiring 30 new people a week, they will feel like they are part of something big and exciting and successful which will IPO. They may not be as impressed by a “sleepy little company” with 12 employees and a dog, even if the sleepy company is profitable and is building a better long-term company.

A sleepy little company in Albuquerque

As a rule of thumb, you can make a nice place to work, or you can promise people they’ll get rich quick. But you have to do one of those, or you won’t be able to hire.

Some of your employees will be impressed by a company with a high chance of an IPO that gives out lots of stock options. Such people will be willing to put in three or four years at a company like this, even if they hate every minute of their working days, because they see the pot at the end of the rainbow.

If you’re growing slowly and organically, the pot may be farther off. In that case, you have no choice but to make a work environment where the journey is the reward. It can’t be hectic 80 hour workweeks. The office can’t be a big noisy loft jammed full of folding tables and hard wooden chairs. You have to give people decent vacations. People have to be friends with their co-workers, not just co-workers. Sociology and community at work matter. Managers have to be enlightened and get off people’s backs, they can’t be Dilbertesque micromanagers. If you do all this, you’ll attract plenty of people who have been fooled too many times by dreams of becoming a millionaire in the next IPO; now they are just looking for something sustainable.

Ben and Jerry’s	Amazon
You’ll probably succeed. You certainly won’t lose too much money.	You have a tiny chance of becoming a billionaire, and a high chance of just failing.

With the Ben and Jerry’s model, if you’re even reasonably smart, you’re going to succeed. It may be a bit of a struggle, there may be good years and bad years, but unless we have another depression, you’re certainly not going to lose too much money, because you didn’t put in too much to begin with.

The trouble with the Amazon model is that all anybody thinks about is Amazon. And there’s only one Amazon. You have to think of the other 95% of companies which spend an astonishing amount of venture capital and then simply fail because nobody wants to buy their product. At least, if you follow the Ben and Jerry’s model, you’ll know that nobody wants your product long before you spend more than one MasterCard’s worth of credit limit on it.

The Worst Thing You Can Do

The worst thing you can do is fail to decide whether you’re going to be a Ben and Jerry’s company or an Amazon company.

If you’re going into a market with no existing competition, lock-in, and network effects, you better use the Amazon model, or you’re going the way of Wordsworth.com, which started two years before Amazon, and nobody’s ever heard of them. Or even worse, you’re going to be a ghost site like MSN Auctions with virtually no chance of ever overcoming ebay. (Read Wordsworth’s reply )

If you’re going into an established market, getting big fast is a fabulous way of wasting tons of money, as did BarnesandNoble.com. Your best hope is to do something sustainable and profitable, so that you have years to slowly take over your competition.

Still can’t decide? There are other things to consider. Think of your personal values. Would you rather have a company like Amazon or a company like Ben and Jerry’s? Read a couple of corporate histories – Amazon and Ben and Jerry’s for starters, even though they are blatant hagiographies, and see which one jibes more with your set of core values. Actually, an even better model for a Ben and Jerry’s company is Microsoft, and there are lots of histories of Microsoft. Microsoft was, in a sense, “lucky” to land the PC-DOS deal, but the company was profitable and growing all along, so they could have hung around indefinitely waiting for their big break.

Think of your risk/reward profile. Do you want to take a shot at being a billionaire by the time you’re 35, even if the chances of doing that make the lottery look like a good deal? Ben and Jerry’s companies are not going to do that for you.

Probably the worst thing you can do is to decide that you have to be an Amazon company, and then act like a Ben and Jerry’s company (while in denial all the time). Amazon companies absolutely must substitute cash for time whenever they can. You may think you’re smart and frugal by insisting on finding programmers who will work at market rates. But you’re not so smart, because that’s going to take you six months, not two months, and those 4 months might mean you miss the Christmas shopping season, so now it cost you a year, and probably made your whole business plan unviable. You may think that it’s smart to have a Mac version of your software, as well as a Windows version, but if it takes you twice as long to ship while your programmers build a compatibility layer, and you only get 15% more customers, well, you’re not going to look so smart, then, are you?

Both models work, but you’ve got to pick one and stick to it, or you’ll find things mysteriously going wrong and you won’t quite know why.

Further reading: The Motley Fool review

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.

It’s a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn’t do it on purpose, now, did they?

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

Netscape wasn’t the first company to make this mistake. Borland made the same mistake when they bought Arago and tried to make it into dBase for Windows, a doomed project that took so long that Microsoft Access ate their lunch, then they made it again in rewriting Quattro Pro from scratch and astonishing people with how few features it had. Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the old code base, so they had something to ship, making it merely a financial disaster, not a strategic one.

We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:

It’s harder to read code than to write it.

This is why code reuse is so hard. This is why everybody on your team has a different function they like to use for splitting strings into arrays of strings. They write their own function because it’s easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.

As a corollary of this axiom, you can ask almost any programmer today about the code they are working on. “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell you. “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start over.”

Why is it a mess?

“Well,” they say, “look at this function. It is two pages long! None of this stuff belongs in there! I don’t know what half of these API calls are for.”

Before Borland’s new spreadsheet for Windows shipped, Philippe Kahn, the colorful founder of Borland, was quoted a lot in the press bragging about how Quattro Pro would be much better than Microsoft Excel, because it was written from scratch. All new source code! As if source code rusted.

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?

Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it’s just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95.

Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it’s like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters.

When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

You are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.

You are putting yourself in an extremely dangerous position where you will be shipping an old version of the code for several years, completely unable to make any strategic changes or react to new features that the market demands, because you don’t have shippable code. You might as well just close for business for the duration.

You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.

Is there an alternative? The consensus seems to be that the old Netscape code base was really bad. Well, it might have been bad, but, you know what? It worked pretty darn well on an awful lot of real world computer systems.

When programmers say that their code is a holy mess (as they always do), there are three kinds of things that are wrong with it.

First, there are architectural problems. The code is not factored correctly. The networking code is popping up its own dialog boxes from the middle of nowhere; this should have been handled in the UI code. These problems can be solved, one at a time, by carefully moving code, refactoring, changing interfaces. They can be done by one programmer working carefully and checking in his changes all at once, so that nobody else is disrupted. Even fairly major architectural changes can be done without throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around, cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with our existing code base, and we didn’t introduce new bugs or throw away working code.

A second reason programmers think that their code is a mess is that it is inefficient. The rendering code in Netscape was rumored to be slow. But this only affects a small part of the project, which you can optimize or even rewrite. You don’t have to rewrite the whole thing. When optimizing for speed, 1% of the work gets you 99% of the bang.

Third, the code may be doggone ugly. One project I worked on actually had a data type called a FuckedString. Another project had started out using the convention of starting member variables with an underscore, but later switched to the more standard “m_”. So half the functions started with “_” and half with “m_”, which looked ugly. Frankly, this is the kind of thing you solve in five minutes with a macro in Emacs, not by starting from scratch.

It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.

The old mantra build one to throw away is dangerous when applied to large scale commercial applications. If you are writing code experimentally, you may want to rip up the function you wrote last week when you think of a better algorithm. That’s fine. You may want to refactor a class to make it easier to use. That’s fine, too. But throwing away the whole program is a dangerous folly, and if Netscape actually had some adult supervision with software industry experience, they might not have shot themselves in the foot so badly.