The single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make

Oldie (originally published April 6, 2000) but goodie from Joel Spolsky on Netscape's decision to re-write Netscape 6.0 from scratch:

It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.

Sunday, May 13 2018