After reading the rest of your post, I'm not sure why.
Joel Spolsky always seemed to me like he was all hat and no cattle -- he had rather strong opinions (and a high opinion of himself) for someone who ran a small company that never did anything of significance.
He has always seemed rather fixated on some kind of superiority complex and separating good programmers from bad, but why should anyone believe that he is one of the good ones? What is he an authority on -- writing software nobody wants to use?
(A good read, like most any one of his pieces - nothing wrong with his writing talent, obviously ...)
Before launching Amazon, Bezos worked at "a financial-trading company on the cutting edge of computer technology" [1].
Wikipedia says he has a degree in "electrical engineering and computer science" [2].
It's reasonable to assume that Bezos has at least some development experience.
[1] http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/A-E/Bezos-Jeff...
I would say, Fog Creek created one of the most important pieces of software in history and one of the most used. It is called "Stack Overflow". Sure. Quote how they are technically are not owned by FogCreek and Joel is just a CEO there. But that is lawyers, you know, lawyer-ing.
"In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Creek_Software#Stack_Overf...
Trello (project management) and Stack Overflow were spun off from Fog Creek parent company, but are not run by Fog Creek.
I used to really respect Joel Spolsky. I've read all of his stuff and really liked it.
But I can't help thinking that Fog Creek just isn't that important of a company. As a decidedly "technical" person, I don't know a single person that uses any of their products. And I really do mean, zero. I know plenty of people that use git, IntelliJ, github, Stack Overflow, Twilio, AWS, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, MongoDB, Pivotal Tracker, hell even JIRA, but nothing from Fog Creek. Ten years in the trenches, writing software, and never have I even once used, or even _met_ anyone that uses their stuff.
Furthermore, the world has kinda moved on. We aren't shipping desktop software anymore and also, it's not enough to release to the web, either. These days people expect mobile apps, complex responsive design, and 1000 other things you didn't need to do 10 years ago. Software is increasingly becoming a field dominated by teams of specialists in all areas, and I just don't get the sense that Gomix was built with this new reality in mind.
Second. I first heard of this guy (Anil) only about a month ago, when I came upon Joel's blog. I heard that he became CEO and yeah, I agree with a lot of what you've written -- a windbag with a political agenda who's great at self-promotion. Honest question though, does this make for a great CEO? We can certainly look to really cerebral guys like Bill Gates as a model for a tech CEO, but consider that Jeff Bezos apparently wasn't a developer. Also consider that more problems in tech are basically "solved" at this point, and as the industry matures, things like promotion and marketing are getting increasingly important. Satya Nadella (Microsoft) himself acknowledged this; I just read last week that Microsoft had some kind of senior meeting, and Satya was on a rant about how MS's culture is too engineering-driven for today's world. I don't have the temperament to be as much of a self-promoter as a guy like Anil, but I know plenty of companies that seem to be run by these guys, like Buffer, Groove, or anyone else specializing in "content marketing", and it seems to be working for them.
So before you dismiss this guy, think of what it takes to make a good tech CEO. I fucking loathe self-promoters, really I do, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that's what it takes to make it in the sort of CRUDdy "tech" that isn't too research-heavy, which is most of software, these days (not autonomous vehicles, genetics, deep learning, thorium reactors, etc)