Joel on Software

2000/08/07

In Strategy Letter I, I wrote:

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.

I was happy to hear back from Sanj Kharbanda over at Wordsworth, who wrote:

Thanks for noticing us!

Read all about it: Wordsworth Responds

While we're on the topic of bookstores, my friend Jill McFarlane is opening a small bookstore and has created a weblog about it.

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!

Want to know more?

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 Trello, easy web-based collaboration software, FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracking and software development tool, and Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.