I don't think I know anybody personally, whose response would be, "I know, let's write a compiler to translate our VBScript into something that runs on Unix."
Yeah it was an odd strategy, I agree. But on the other hand, translating one scripting language to another doesn't sound sound that unreasonable either.
From the article:
The super obvious answer is to tell unix customers to install Chilisoft ASP. Boom. Done. Except it costs more than FogBugz does.
I remember hearing of Chilisoft ASP. Never used it, and I have no idea what it cost. I'd be curious if they attempted to negotiate any kind of discount for Chilisoft ASP, maybe locked to FogBugz somehow. Compared to running FogBugz on ASP, which I'm guessing would have required at minimum a Windows Server and a SQL Server license, you'd think some kind of deal could have been arranged.
The other thing I'm curious about is how many Unix installations of FogBugz were sold? From what I've seen, customers who are willing to actually pay for a bug tracker would not blink about buying a Windows server to run it, if that's what it required.
Having listened to nearly all of Spolsky's SO/SE podcasts, I think the other factor is that Spolsky's strategy has been to control critical dependencies by keeping them in house. StackExchange runs on its own servers rather than in the cloud so that problems fall into StackExchange's queue not in with other people's at a cloud computing provider. If FogCreek had made Fogbugz depend on ChilliSoft, then infrastructure problems with Unix integration would have been fixed on ChilliSoft's timeline if they were fixed at all. Writing Wasabi meant that Fogbugz had a more predictable development schedule controlled and instrumented by FogCreek.
Yeah it was an odd strategy, I agree. But on the other hand, translating one scripting language to another doesn't sound sound that unreasonable either.
From the article:
The super obvious answer is to tell unix customers to install Chilisoft ASP. Boom. Done. Except it costs more than FogBugz does.
I remember hearing of Chilisoft ASP. Never used it, and I have no idea what it cost. I'd be curious if they attempted to negotiate any kind of discount for Chilisoft ASP, maybe locked to FogBugz somehow. Compared to running FogBugz on ASP, which I'm guessing would have required at minimum a Windows Server and a SQL Server license, you'd think some kind of deal could have been arranged.
The other thing I'm curious about is how many Unix installations of FogBugz were sold? From what I've seen, customers who are willing to actually pay for a bug tracker would not blink about buying a Windows server to run it, if that's what it required.