Or, for those who hate TinyURLs...

"""
So tossing out that codebase may not have been as bad a choice as it seems to JWZ and Spolsky.
It's just that the rewrite didn't go as cleanly as Netscape hoped. 
"""

Joel's point is that it usually doesn't.

The browser could have been overhauled subsystem by subsystem, yielding a gradually improving
Communicator, rather than a horrid product for years and years, while their only hope for
salvation lay in pieces on the floor.  By the time they had a product to offer again, the
world had gone on, and forgotten who they were.  By the time they had a product again, that
big blue 'E' *was* "The Internet".  We are still paying for the overconfidence, and total lack
of marketing sence exhibited by the project back in the heady days of the dot.com bubble.