So in a way, the original mistake was made even before FogBasic/Wasabi entered the picture: by buying into the wonderful MS ecosystem, FogCreek condemned themselves to 10 years of hacks for cross-platform support. And they've learnt their lesson so well that they're now consolidating on C#, another de-facto MS-only technology which only benefits from the fact that someone else (Mono) is doing cross-platform hacks for everyone.
Joel is great, but this choice baffled me in the past and baffles me today. For the sort of software FogBugz is, they would have had a much simpler life with Java, Python, Ruby, even Perl. Despite all of Joel's insight into "making html sing", he behaved like an accountant building humongous Excel macros "because that's what we know".
Remember the age of Fogbugz. It was initially released in 2000.
MS Windows was by far the dominant operating system. Virtualization was still in its early stages, and mostly at the desktop level. Linux was still growing in the server market but not dominant as it is today.
And what is exactly is wrong with the MS ecosystem if you're targeting enterprise? There are still a lot of businesses that work exclusively with Windows servers with IT managers that don't want the headache of having Linux servers.
Enterprise software tends to be a notch or two below consumer software in the "it just works department", and my experience with deploying Java based enterprise software was pretty negative. In 2000, not a lot of people were using Ruby, Python or Perl for enterprise web apps. It was mostly ASP and JSP back then.
> Remember the age of Fogbugz. It was initially released in 2000.
God, don't I half remember it. I was a junior ASP dev at the time, for my sins. Java was hot like the sun and PHP was the default choice for the young and penniless. Perl was mainstream. Python and Ruby were new and rough (they were crap for webdev on shared hosts, with zero support by ISPs, but alpha geeks were already flocking to their ecosystems, Python in particular).
I'm sure part of the reasoning was that FogBugz did not start as a product -- the product back then was CityDesk, which was even more tied in the MS world -- but still, the "server scene" back then was already unix-y, which is why they were pretty soon forced to consider Linux support. I still think it was a shortsighted approach but hey, FogCreek is still alive 15 years later, so I guess it wasn't all that bad.
One of my first jobs ages ago was to convert a large Perl codebase to ASP 2.0 because my new boss, a 22 year old CTO, was replacing a guy more than twice his age and Perl was "for old folks" as he put it. This one person turned the whole company into a Microsoft dev shop with one decision simply because he didn't feel comfortable around Perl code.
COO at a previous company did this, went from Java to .Net shop. This was two years ago. Laid off most of the Java developers, brought in consultants. I had left, but there were some really intricate business processes in that code base, running on a 40 node jboss cluster. They embarked on a rewrite, which of course is taking longer than promised. All the Java developers who could, got jobs and left, now there are only two guys left who know how to deploy to the the cluster. And they use scripts, they don't understand anything they're doing. The competent people left long ago.
"In particular, we didn't want to have to tell them to get a Java Virtual Machine up and running, because that's not easy, and they're not really a hundred percent compatible."
He seems like an OK guy, but comments like that make me think he made a decision first and then made up reasons later. How hard can it be to make a simple installer that checks and installs Java, many applications do that.
>> How hard can it be to make a simple installer that checks and installs Java, many applications do that.
You'd be surprised how many applications don't do that too. There's a reason why a lot of people say "enterprise software sucks" -- it's usually because the software makers value new features over improving how things work.
It is more difficult than it looks, but then again support multiple Linux distributions with a simple Apache installer is more difficult than it looks as well.
I suspect that this is a function of overestimating the effort on the Java side and underestimating both the demand and the work on the non-Windows side.
They used to be an extremely Windows-centric company.
To a point. Headless stuff tends to work way better than the GUI stuff.
It's kind of the same tune with mobile software -- "Native feels and runs better than everything else". In the case of enterprise software GUIs, it's particularly true.
The difference this time is that C# is now open source. Sure, C# is still essentially Microsoft-only, but there are enough users that if Microsoft abandoned it, it's fairly certain that others would be there to pick up the pieces.
IIRC, Joel once wrote that he started coding FogBugz to learn some VBScript. Once you start a project in a language, there is a mighty amount of inertia to overcome to move to a different language...
Joel is great, but this choice baffled me in the past and baffles me today. For the sort of software FogBugz is, they would have had a much simpler life with Java, Python, Ruby, even Perl. Despite all of Joel's insight into "making html sing", he behaved like an accountant building humongous Excel macros "because that's what we know".