Whether Joel Spolsky is or is not a tool, lucky, good etc is completely irrelevant. He and the rest of the SE/SO team has built a highly scalable solution based on .NET. So in a discussion about scaling on .NET, it absolutely makes sense to listen to his experiences.
Actually, FogBugz is trivial to scale - there is never any more than a few dozen, to hundreds of users for any one project.
And Copilot wasn't even envisaged or created by Joel, but was rather a project created by some interns.
FogCreek doesn't innovate (they have a bug tracker and a remote support application based on VNC). Joel just happened to be one of the first to blog constantly about technology. He doesn't even allow comments on his posts because he doesn't want to have to deal with people contradicting him (not that he doesn't do an excellent job at this himself).
There are so many great developers and businesses out there that you could use as an example to model your business and software on. Use them, not Joel. Let Joel's business and opinions fade away as other smart, innovative companies run rings around his ageing product suite.
Someone approached hiwith the idea for that product, it wasn't his.
Besides, this is a perfect example of him contradicting himself about how taking VC is a bad idea.
Besides, do you think they are profitable yet? How do you think they will get there without heading down the Expert's Exchange track? And let's not forget how much chaff is now being added every day to these sites, it now seems to be impossible to ask a difficult question because only relative newbies seem to be the only ones answering questions.
