Gadgetopia

Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity: Joel Spolsky wrote the forward to the new book In Search of Stupidity. He has some interesting thoughts on the eternal struggle between the programmers and the marketing department:

Netscape’s monumental decision to rewrite their browser instead of improving the old code base cost them several years of Internet time, during which their market share went from around 90% to about 4% … There are still scads of programmers who defend Netscape’s ground-up rewrite. ‘The old code really sucked, Joel!’ Yeah, uh-huh. Such programmers should be admired for their love of clean code, but they shouldn’t be allowed within 100 feet of any business decisions, since it’s obvious that clean code is more important to them than shipping, uh, software.