Evolution not Revolution

June 18th, 2004

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.

Filed Under

Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Evolution not Revolution”

  1. NativeMind says:
    6/24/2004 at 11:25 pm

    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.

  2. idol lash says:
    11/22/2011 at 2:35 pm

    I’m normally to blogging and i genuinely appreciate your posts. The write-up has genuinely peaks my interest. I’m going to bookmark your site and keep checking picking out particulars.