Joel Spolsky, like all frequent writers, can be full of a great deal of hot air but the case study in his piece is 'a guy who was instrumental in writing and shipping the first widely usable web browser'. The 'debunking' is supported by someone's comment on twitter and a reference to a guy who writes books rather than software. Spolsky might have oversimplified, glossed intricacies over but you're hardly going to refute his point by oversimplifying further, digging through your tweets or summoning the persuasive power of a popular methodology to your aid. Because, you know, the other guy wrote Netscape.