I ran across an Interview with Scott Collins about Mozilla at ArsTechnica. In light of Joel Spolsky’s How Microsoft Lost the API War article, I found one comment particularly interesting:
And we didn’t get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever
This was obviously an emotional issue for Scott, and I think he is right.
Engineer types seldom recognize the incredible risk involved with embarking on a rewrite of an existing, working application. Joel’s point, is that Microsoft is making a similar mistake with their APIs today.
Harry speculates that PHP may be able to pick up some of the market share loss that this type of mistake could lead to.
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I read once that writing code is just like designing GUIs in terms of how important usability is. One thing about usability… you can’t yank the carpet out of under a user’s feet and expect them to be happy.