[jaredsohn]

>MS was not notable back then

Really? Then by your standard which tech companies were notable then? (he worked there during 1991-1993) BTW, Joel created VBA for Excel as a program manager around the time when Excel gained popularity over Lotus 1-2-3. There are graphs here: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/sheets/sheet.html. Figure 8.6 shows revenue share.

The other company that he had worked at (Juno) was something that I was also familiar with as a consumer.

To support your point, however, Joel's work experience was more on the product side than actual programming. However, ironically for this discussion, the VBA that Joel designed is the way that many noncoders in a business first start coding.