NYT Paywall Cost $40 Million: How? 305
An anonymous reader submits this musing from Philip Greenspun's blog: "Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on?" Maybe the folks behind CityTime were free on weekends.
Corporation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Its easy (Score:5, Funny)
you actually forgot one bit.
hiring 'shadow developers' (also known as retards) and inflating the team size from the 10 needed to the unnecessary 100+ with testers. the times still receives just the output from 5 good guys but gets a bill for 100+. and every new person introduced to the team is more profit, as the there's more hours and persons to bill for(so they hire an unnecessary new guy/gal to inflate the team, the new person costs say 5000$ a month, the client is billed for 6000$, the company ruining executives keeping the difference . and universities have been just inventing new professions so it's pretty easy to inflate the team with sheep experts, marketing advisors, accessibility destroyers etc. and every single one of them will try to come up with output that would change the end product somehow, to justify their job).
1 million for the code (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Large organization doing something simple (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.
I guess you don't have any kids then. (What am I saying. This is slashdot.)
Dude, shut up! (Score:5, Funny)
Look, we told them we had to program an autonomous artificial intelligence agent to proactively scan cyberspace for hackers looking to bypass the firewall using port cross-scripting. They bought it, don't screw this up for us.
Re:Large organization doing something simple (Score:5, Funny)
The common reason that we're not taken seriously is that we don't have a big enough team to deliver on time, and if these larger companies can't stay on schedule then we have no hope in hell.
Next time you have a project, you can hire me as a consultant. You won't have to manage me, and I won't do any work, and will only require a token salary, but I'll increase the size of your team by 50% and therefore make you seem 50% more credible!