
Fog Creek Is Now Glitch, Inc - mattl
https://medium.com/glitch/fog-creek-is-now-glitch-5a57dab604e3
======
PhilWright
I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic, I read his excellent blog articles way back
when they were first written. His intelligence, business acumen and subsequent
success are not in dispute. I am a big fan of his ideas and work. But even I
would say this marketing puff piece is over the top, I thought it must have
been satire...

"Back in 2000, two visionary founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor,
envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it
treated people — both its employees and its customers"

Visionaries? The company they started was a consulting shop that only later
transformed into software products when the dot com boom crashed and
consulting dried up. Was that part of the vision?

"The company they created, Fog Creek Software, has gone on to create multiple
ground-breaking products and to help change the entire tech industry along the
way."

Trello is great and I use it myself, but it is a TODO list application and
certainly not ground-breaking. FogBugz is a bug tracker, which is not ground-
breaking, and was actually out-competed by JIRA. StackOverflow is definitely
ground-breaking and I would agree changed the software development industry,
but the original idea came from Jeff Atwood with Fog Creek providing mainly
the money and initial public profile.

"...other successful and influential products like Manuscript and Kiln and
Copilot and CityDesk..."

I mean no disrespect but I would not consider any of them successful and
influential.

Maybe Glitch will become a big product in the future, but for now can be step
down the marketing intern that wrote this whilst drinking too much caffeine.

~~~
SyneRyder
_> I think Joel Spolsky is fantastic..._

It might be worth pointing out that Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor aren't
really involved at Fog Creek anymore. Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow now,
and Michael is CEO at Trello. The CEO at Fog Creek has been Anil Dash since
December 2016:

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-
the-n...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/06/anil-dash-is-the-new-ceo-
of-fog-creek-software/)

~~~
anildash
Well, Joel is still the chairman of our board, and I spoke to both Joel &
Michael them yesterday, so while they're certainly running Stack Overflow and
Trello, respectively, we do benefit from their wisdom and experience.

The video linked in this piece explains Glitch a bit, but since this was a
corporate announcement (and really only of interest to people who track such
things), I didn't want to go too far into talking about the product itself.
Ironically, it was because I knew folks on HN would say this kind of
announcement is too heavy on the marketing.

On the plus side, we listed a bunch of new jobs, and the response seems to be
extremely strong, so different people have different impressions about the
announcement, I guess.

------
usr1106
I have followed Spoelsky and Fog Creek more in the past but less recently.
This piece of self-praise fails to convey the message what Glitch (community?,
product?) is all about. They are assuming everybody knows, but that seems to
be an overestimation, given the low attention the item has drawn on HN so far.

~~~
Kagerjay
I've used glitch before... its like plunkr.co , or codesandbox.io

Glitch (the software) has been around for like 3-4 years... but the marketing
is some of the worst I've ever seen especially for a well established company
like Fogcreek ( _now glitch, inc, how is that different from glitch software.
Makes it even more confusing now_?)

The UX is just... no. One of the worst examples of UX possible in my opinion.
I say this after trying thousands of tools. Contrasting colors everywhere,
going on that site is like a deer seeing headlights for the first time. Except
those headlights are constantly strobing different colors. Constantly. Enough
to give it a seizure, if it stares too long

The logo isn't pleasant on the eyes. It seems very retro, but not really. What
does fish have to do with the word "glitch"? Why two fishies? The first word
when I hear "glitch" is the movie Matrix, which fits in the theme... since its
programming.

The plain white background contrasted by the bright antonym colors everywhere
are VERY distracting.

The 1,000,000 drafts created... are mostly driven by online course users
following along. Possibly, many K-12 school courses. I have used the "help"
section a few times and I haven't gotten many helpful responses from it. I had
used glitch in one of the MOOC's I took earlier with watchandcode's practical
javascript. I had used glitch's API through freecodecamp as well, but all I
needed was the endpoint anyhow.

I honestly question what Glitch is trying to do. What are they trying to do?
Have they lost their touch? I say this in all seriousness, I really don't
know. I'm sure the backend programming is topnotch, frontend...not really.

Where is money going to come from with glitch...? Schools? Ads? Who is the
userbase? Is it newcoming young age developers? Why would I want to use this
tool over all the more beautiful tools out there like codesandbox and codepen?
What's the appeal? Why the logo choice? What is the overall theme? Why the
strong contrasting colors on white? What have they done in the last 3 to 4
years?

The only real benefit I see for a company using glitch is having a place to
host a REST API.

I even ran a siteprofiler on glitch.. I am even more confused now. The top
keyword was "news, google, blog, community, search" 1MM monthly visits,
compare this to codepen which is "programming, design,
webdevelopment,google,blog" , 24MM monthly visits.

What I did see is glitch is used alot for A-frame, and VR tutorials / hosting.
And some starter react-projects as well for courses

~~~
detaro
All those alternatives you mention appear to be for client-side code only? I
see people using Glitch for running small services quite a bit.

Agreed with your questions about monetization.

~~~
Kagerjay
I must not know about what glitch's small services are for. They do have paid
plans for monetization. I would be really curious to know what companies are
using them for what service and why

