I cannot point my finger on what exactly I like about Joel, but ideas like this and a perfect implementation are a good hint.

Taking four interns (three in development and one in marketing) and putting together a product from the beginning to the end is just, hm, how to say this a brilliant idea! Or maybe I’m absolutely wrong it’s the right idea.

Just think about it, if you want a new product, it has to be fresh. How do you get fresh ideas? Definitely not from tired, locked on statistics and technologies brains but rather from fresh and young minds. How do you pull a product from beginning to the first launch in 3 or 4 months if not with fresh and young people fully charged with energy and eager to prove themselves?

I was rather sceptic about their first two products, a bug management system (issue tracking) and web editor in a saturated market with both free and commercial products. I still think that if you remove Joel from Fog Creek they would remain with two 20$ shareware products. But this one sounds great, and not because of the technology since it is nothing new, Unix had it since the beginnings of X, VNC is out there from some time and it’s even free, and every version of Windows XP Pro ships with it, yet still they found the market to it, made it a bit simpler (not that it was too complicated) and definitely know how to present it.

As a matter of fact I know now what I like about Joel, he’s cult for simplicity and doing what feel right no matter what anybody else is used to do.