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One on One with Joel Spolsky

I had a few opportunities to talk to Joel Spolsky while at the Business of Software conference, which I was pretty excited about. On day two, I even got to talk to him one on one for a few minutes. I remembered reading a few weeks ago an article where he was talking about Apple's image vs. Microsoft's image and he said,

And “Apple” in California is, of course, on the literal level, a computer company, and not a very nice one...

Now, I'm not necessarily an Apple fan; I own an iPod and some stock, and that's about it right now, although my next computer could be an Apple. For this reason, I didn't take issue with his comment, I just wondered about it. I especially wondered about it because Joel comes from Microsoft and I know Fog Creek works a lot with MS SQL Server and other Microsoft technologies. So I wanted to get an idea of whether he specifically liked one company over the other and if so, why.

I asked him about the comment and he cleared things up a bit. First of all, he said his comment meant exactly what it said, not what it implied, which is that Apple is not especially nice, although they're not especially un-nice. So he meant there is nothing about Apple that really makes them nicer, they just have that image. And he says that he doesn't have an iPhone, among other reasons, because of how well his current Windows-based phone works with Exchange. And he says he doesn't have a MacBook because he could never get all the software he uses to work on a Mac. So from what I could tell, his feeling on Microsoft vs. Apple is that generally Microsoft is better at servicing people's business needs because they have always had an everything-to-everyone mentality.