Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Re:Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by wallflower on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @08:46PM (#920719)

Atlassian Confluence (the corporate wiki product from Fog Creek's probable competitor) has pitiful search functionality, among other things, for all the revenue that product probably generates from site licensing.

That being said, Atlassian Confluence's "Wiki" is updated nearly every minute (according to the homepage dashboard) at my company. It's not just a Wiki; it's a Wiki that normal business users can use. Fog Creek seems to think they can take on their competitor by mainly focusing on features while IMHO Atlassian's strength is producing an adequate product that works and more importantly makes the person at a company who leads and drives its adoption a likely corporate hero. Corporate sales is tough but lucrative.

> "What set Oracle apart from Ingres," Moore writes, "was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres 'accepted' 50 percent growth."

To achieve 100% growth: Oracle salespeople were fired if they did not achieve a doubling of their sales quota on a yearly basis.

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Re:Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by chrisbroadfoot on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @11:22PM (#920995)

More specifically, the competing product he's referring to is probably Atlassian's JIRA (bug tracking software).

I for one thought that Joel sounded a bit sour and jealous. Is it that Fog Creek is losing its "market leadership position"? (was Fog Creek ever a market leader?)

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Re:Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by pchristensen on Wednesday November 04, 2009 @10:40AM (#921838)

I wouldn't say jealous, more like disoriented to realize that his business hypothesis might be invalid. He designed his company to be a high quality competitor among many, but now he's got to face a category killer which requires very different tactics. A core part of his business has to change to something he doesn't necessarily want.

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Re:Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by jshen on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @11:34PM (#921009)

It's a running joke at my company about how bad the search is in confluence. It's shockingly bad.

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Re:Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by wallflower on Wednesday November 04, 2009 @03:56AM (#921344)

One thing that helps (a little) is to try their "Boolean" search support. Use all-caps AND and OR. Example: svn AND instructions AND command-line

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Re:Spolsky: Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by chrisbroadfoot on Wednesday November 04, 2009 @07:06AM (#921517)

In Confluence, the default is AND.

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