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Comment by devnonymous | Hacker News Reader

...as an aside, out of curiosity, does anyone know why the "...and the company goes away." phrase was linked to www.towerrecordsmovie.com specifically and how is that related to Fog Creek ?

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I'm really glad somebody asked this, because I'm the CEO of Fog Creek and I had no idea what Joel was talking about with that. :)

Congratulations!

congrats, Anil! Great news for Fog Creek, and a great opportunity for you to have a big impact on software development!

Hopefully one of the early things you'll be focusing on is the diversity of GoMix's technology (including building accessibility in by default) and its community. There's huge potential, and a great chance to address it at a relatively early stage.

Absolutely. Right now, Gomix is not very accessible (in terms of editing code, not mental model), but that's definitely an area we'd like to improve in. And more broadly, making the creation of tech accessible to a far larger audience is fundamental to Gomix's mission, and to Fog Creek overall. We're committed to getting it right.

Great to hear!

Along those lines, are you hiring engineers now who want to improve that process? Creating dynamic ways to develop products and edit code.

It seems like the positions listed here http://www.fogcreek.com/careers are support roles instead of product roles.

The surrounding paragraph gives a bit more helpful context.

"A typical startup is built around a single product, and some theory that people will pay money for that product. This theory eventually become false, and the company goes away."

The link to towerrecordsmovie.com is suggesting that many single-product companies outlive their product's usefulness, such as Tower Records. Tower Records was a large seller of physical music media (CDs, Casettes, Vinyl) which went out of business in the mid-2000s.

The author is suggesting that since Fog Creek is not a single-product company that this does not apply to them.

Incidentally, Tower Records didn't 'go away', it's still doing roaring business in Japan, specifically because Japanese like the tactile feel of CDs, and because Japan's anti-crime culture generally meant that file-sharing never became a thing [https://medium.com/cuepoint/the-tower-records-stuck-in-time-...].

A lot of the time when a product or service appears to have 'gone away' it's actually moved on to serving a different audience with different needs.

I'm glad to hear this. I'll never forget the hour or so I spent at the Tower Records store in Shibuya in the mid-90s. That store was gigantic! As a twelve year old with limited pocket money i had a tough time choosing the 3rd, 4th and 5th CDs I'd ever owned. Good times!

Same - the many hours I spent in Tower Records in Shibuya came to mind as I was writing this comment.

It's still a huge store, I was there last year. I thought it's a Japanese company in the first place, but apparently it wasn't? One of the biggest Japanese convenience store chains, Lawson, also used to be an American chain.

I don't know what amount of revenue they run, but tower.com is I believe the same company. They closed the brick and mortar stores in markets where those weren't competitive. It's good to be flexible. You can choose to follow a market and live or die with it, or you can choose to follow the customers to the new market. In the US, most of the market for certain items is via online orders.

We still have Tower in Ireland too, I think it's under a franchise agreement

Tower Japan isn't the same company. They bought themselves out of the parent company 15 years ago.

Tower Records was so wrapped up in selling physical goods (CDs and earlier, LPs) that they were totally blindsided by the rapid change in listener preferences. They didn't react quickly enough, soon enough, as sales fell off a cliff thinking it a temporary correction instead of a fundamental change.

So the lesson is that once a company has "made it" they should diversify so that they aren't dependent on a single income stream.

You should totally watch the film, btw. I used to shop at the Watt Avenue store in Sacramento, and the breadth of titles they carried was amazing. Easily five times the product that a store like Sam Goody would carry, and in niches you'd never see anywhere else. If there were such a thing as Celtic Rap, Tower Records would have carried it.

You had me curious so I looked it up. There is in fact at least one Celtic Rap group out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manau_(group).

Of course there had to be one. :)

My brother in law was a buyer for Tower. They weren't blindsided, they knew it was coming. The record labels at first refused to license music to them for digital distribution, then later insisted on onerous terms. Tower missed out on digital because of the record labels. It took Steve Jobs' force of personality to knock sense into the labels.

Steve Jobs' force of personality combined with the iPod and iTunes.

Interestingly, I recently browsed in the Dublin Tower Records store and the LPs now outnumber the CDs. Currently, they’re the largest specialist retailer in physical media (music, films and books) in Dublin.

As I understand it, the Dublin franchise became independent of the Tower parent company some years past – or at least they advertised themselves as being “independent”.

http://www.towerrecords.ie/aboutus.asp

It's a company that went away? Tower Records and Tower Video were very dear to New Yorkers who were here in the 90s and early 2000s.

Sort of, all the US based stores closed (went away) in 2006. Most of the international stores hung on, but most of them are now closed. So from their mega footprint in the 90's and 2K's to a few stores means they've gone away.

Sorry to see that happen, but it does.

I think it's a reference to how some businesses go out of business when the the theory that people will pay money for a product fails to hold true. Tower Records being one such example.

That said, the tenses and general grammar of the whole sentence don't really hold up to the usual Joel standards and sits very strangely.

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