Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it. – Joel on Software

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Have a look at this little chart:

[Source: Iris Associates]

This is a chart showing the number of installed seats of the Lotus Notes workgroup software, from the time it was introduced in 1989 through 2000. In fact when Notes 1.0 finally shipped it had been under development for five years. Notice just how dang long it took before Notes was really good enough that people started buying it. Indeed, from the first line of code written in 1984 until the hockey-stick part of the curve where things really started to turn up, about 11 years passed. During this time Ray Ozzie and his crew weren’t drinking piña coladas in St Barts. They were writing code.

The reason I’m telling you this story is that it’s not unusual for a serious software application. The Oracle RDBMS has been around for 22 years now. Windows NT development started 12 years ago. Microsoft Word is positively long in the tooth; I remember seeing Word 1.0 for DOS in high school (that dates me, doesn’t it? It was 1983.)

To experienced software people, none of this is very surprising. You write the first version of your product, a few people use it, they might like it, but there are too many obvious missing features, performance problems, whatever, so a year later, you’ve got version 2.0. Everybody argues about which features are going to go into 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, because there are so many important things to do. I remember from the Excel days how many things we had that we just had to do. Pivot Tables. 3-D spreadsheets. VBA. Data access. When you finally shipped a new version to the waiting public, people fell all over themselves to buy it. Remember Windows 3.1? And it positively, absolutely needed long file names, it needed memory protection, it needed plug and play, it needed a zillion important things that we can’t imagine living without, but there was no time, so those features had to wait for Windows 95.

But that’s just the first ten years. After that, nobody can think of a single feature that they really need. Is there anything you need that Excel 2000 or Windows 2000 doesn’t already do? With all due respect to my friends on the Office team, I can’t help but feel that there hasn’t been a useful new feature in Office since about 1995. Many of the so-called "features" added since then, like the reviled ex-paperclip and auto-document-mangling, are just annoyances and O’Reilly is doing a nice business selling books telling you how to turn them off.

So, it takes a long time to write a good program, but when it’s done, it’s done. Oh sure, you can crank out a new version every year or two, trying to get the upgrade revenues, but eventually people will ask: "why fix what ain’t broken?"

Failure to understand the ten-year rule leads to crucial business mistakes.

Mistake number 1. The Get Big Fast syndrome. This fallacy of the Internet bubble has already been thoroughly discredited elsewhere, so I won’t flog it too much. But an...