What "out the door" really means ;-)

I hope I'm not just posting geek stuff now :-) but I came across this little something regarding exhortation and working practices by Joel on Software...

from Microsoft-watch again
Novell vs. Microsoft: Here We Go Again:
Friday, November 12, 2004
Novell vs. Microsoft: Here We Go Again
By Mary Jo Foley

"Former Softie Joel Spolsky (of 'Joel on Software') fame � who is more of a Microsoft critic than cheerleader � also attributed Microsoft's success in the desktop suite market to Novell's marketing and development problems at least as much as Microsoft's strong-arm tactics.

'WordPerfect was written in the low level Assembler programming language, which meant it took ten times as much work to implement a simple feature than it took in Microsoft Word, which was written in the then state-of-the-art C programming language,' recalled Spolsky, a former member of the Excel team at Microsoft.

' It didn't help that the culture at WordPerfect was very relaxed and genial: Utah family men who were out the door every day at 5:00 sharp. They had no hope of keeping up with the hoards of aggressive twenty-somethings at Microsoft burning the midnight oil and using the latest tools. Microsoft Word was better and was available sooner, so it's not fair to attribute all of WordPerfect's problems to Microsoft's anti-competitive practices.'"