Those who were there would be better at telling the story, but up until the Atlassian acquisition and Joel deciding to spend most of his time on a collection of other projects[1], my sense of FC was "software for developers." The original product they made for project planning (FogBugz) and its SCM companion (Kiln) continued on for a while, but seemed to have faded as Glitch ramped up.
The other one that comes to mind is Copilot, whose development was chronicled in the Aardvark'd movie - I think Tyler took over the project and is still running it on the side, last I heard.
Kind of bittersweet to see these fade away, but Glitch seems to have had more critical success outside of their traditional user base so they're running with it.
Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks[1] is a delightful time capsule of 2005 software development. It includes interviews with @pg, the Reddit founders, and other delights. It's available on youtube now.
When I interviewed at Fog Creek, they had a DVD copy of Aardvark'd in a care package in my hotel room. I watched it that night, and for my interview day in the morning it felt like everyone I interviewed with was a movie star. Sneaky plan, Joel. Well executed.
I was actually wondering "hey, isn't that the old Fog Creek"? And went on their website, and yeah, not even a mention of FogBugz.
It's been kind of wild to see how FogBugz went from their main, almost exclusive priority, to something of barely any significance to the company, and now I'm guessing it's a forgotten product in a subsidiary of a giant CDN. Who knows how long until it's shut down.
It's sad; I still love the whole evidence-based scheduling part of it, and have never seen anything else like it.
FogBugz's evidence-based scheduling always resonated with me too. Back in grad school I remember writing a paper arguing how it was a fundamentally better way to manage project estimates and schedules. Curiously, even at Fog Creek, something happened over time where we kind of migrated away from using it and instead favored more kanban-style project management systems.
I think a few forces came together to diminish the relative importance of EBS in project management:
- Rapid shipping got easier; rather than uploading executables (or minting CDs!) we shifted to the SaaS model and with that, continuous delivery, etc. In this world, coordinating a "big release" became more of a marketing/communication topic than an engineering one. In the FogBugz customer base, it was the game development companies that held on to EBS the longest.
- Developer tools in general got easier and faster to use, and along with that all of our tolerance for managing timers and estimates went down. Estimation and work tracking I think are still hugely valuable, but there's an ever-higher UX bar to hit to actually have people use the software, and we want the computer to be smart enough to figure it out on its own. EBS never achieved that fluency of UX and it really needs diligent users for it to perform well.
For the last ~10 years of Fog Creek, we were largely structured so that we had core groups of developers focused on our mainstay products, like FogBugz, which were happily profitable revenue sources and could fund all of our assorted bits of inventiveness. After pushing on FogBugz and Kiln in an innovative way for a few years, we came up against an adoption wall of sorts--- changing those products to increase their user base was harder than inventing entirely new products. Trello, in many ways, represented our next stab at productivity and software development tools, and making FogBugz more Trello-like was never going to be as compelling as Trello already was. This pattern kept repeating, and so we did our best to stabilize FogBugz while inventing other sorts of things that would show us a more compelling path to growth.
Glitch was the biggest next invention and its interest and adoption so greatly outpaced what growth we could achieve in FogBugz that it make sense to reorient around it. But of course FogBugz paid the bills and Glitch wasn't doing so yet, so that lead to a VC raise for Glitch and, ultimately, a sell-off of FogBugz and Kiln.
I still love FogBugz, and all of the users of FogBugz were ultimately the seed funders of inventions like Kiln, Stack Overflow, Trello, Glitch, HASH, CoPilot, and a dozen others that we never let past internal testing. Thanks, FogBugz :-)
edit: Maybe you shouldn't download random PDF's from the internet; here is the text and links:
--
Copilot is Closing
Hi,
I'm Tyler, owner and founding member of Copilot.
Copilot was originally built by a team of interns in 2005 at Fog Creek Software in New York City. I was one of those interns. In 2014, Copilot became its own company and relocated, with me, to Denver, Colorado. For the past 8 years, I have been running it independently, providing people all over the world with simple, effective screen sharing.
However, this past year, it has become clear that Copilot is no longer providing the level of service that I would like it to. After much thought, I have decided it is time to shut Copilot down. The reasons are simple: Technology is changing rapidly, and as an independent software vendor, I am no longer able to keep up with those changes, while maintaining compatibility with the older systems that so frequently need support.
The Good News
Because user experience is a key factor in closing Copilot down, shutting it down without an alternative was never an option. So I set about trying to find another company who offers similar services to partner with, to continue giving Copilot users a great screen sharing service.
To that end, Copilot has chosen HelpDesk by RemotePC¹ to provide future screen sharing services. I've spoken with the team at RemotePC and trialed their software extensively. I'm confident it will meet and exceed your needs.
As a bonus, they're offering Copilot users 95% off the first year, meaning that you will get HelpDesk for a full year for just $24.98, with unlimited users and computers. Or, if you just want to kick the tires, you can try it free for 7 days. Sign up here.¹
How It Will Happen
Copilot's servers will remain operational until May 1, 2022, and your account will continue to be active until that time. On May 1, all services will cease and all remaining subscriptions will be ended. For those who choose to move to HelpDesk by RemotePC, your account will be canceled automatically when you sign up for a paid account. As always, you can cancel your Copilot account at any time on your account page² or you can email support@copilot.com with any other questions or concerns.
Thank You
I want to thank everyone who has used Copilot over the years. It's been my privilege to be a part of Copilot from the beginning and to hear how many people it has helped over the years. Truly, thank you.
Those who were there would be better at telling the story, but up until the Atlassian acquisition and Joel deciding to spend most of his time on a collection of other projects[1], my sense of FC was "software for developers." The original product they made for project planning (FogBugz) and its SCM companion (Kiln) continued on for a while, but seemed to have faded as Glitch ramped up.
The other one that comes to mind is Copilot, whose development was chronicled in the Aardvark'd movie - I think Tyler took over the project and is still running it on the side, last I heard.
Kind of bittersweet to see these fade away, but Glitch seems to have had more critical success outside of their traditional user base so they're running with it.
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/12/05/so-hows-that-retir...