<quote>
“I think people underestimate how difficult it is to launch anything across 5-6 countries & languages simultaneous, especially with the back-end billing integration stuff so that you get it on your mobile phone bill, not entering your credit card number.

Most websites tend to launch in ONE language (English normally) then add on other languages as they grow (360 tried to launch in 5 languages from Day 1). Most websites tend to launch and then grow organically, giving you a chance to tweak/refine/improve… but in 360 it had an immediate audience of VF customers who expected email/chat/social networking + phone to work AS GOOD AS the best examples in the market.

• Email as good as Gmail + Hotmail + Yahoo!
• Chat as good as Meebo, Fring etc to aggregate all the chat providers
• Social networking as good as Facebook + Twitter + MySpace + Zing + etc
• Photo sharing as good as Flickr

If you think about it like that, and remember how ver1.0 of some of those services were far from perfect, you begin to understand what VF had bitten off… with no “track record” of having the internal capability to deliver such a complex software development they had to deliver their ver1.0 service that was as good as ver3 or 4 or 4 of these other services.

</quote>

Then you add in an AppStore as good as Apple. navigation from Wayfinder, address book sharing from Zyb, building out a data centre to host it (across both Windows & Unix platforms) etc etc…

Even a highly experienced development house would choke on a project of that size.

Never gonna happen.

Here's a question for everyone who has done some coding. Two platforms/clients have the same codebase, preprocessing statements are used to make individual builds. Now think of this, Vodafone outsources one to a different company in UK and the portin of the other Client to another company in germany. a single team of 4 was replaced with 2 companies and many many more contractors. Can anyone justify this as redundancy?

Couple of good and experienced developers in Copenhagen, UK and Dusseldorf lost their jobs for our spineless manager thinks its easy to outsource project rather to handle them on his own.

And the only thing our champion knowall manager can say is “I will give u the best of references. I have a lot of contacts on LinkedIn, u know how well connected I am in the industry” (as if to say dont open your mouth about whats happenening or i'll mess ur career). He'll surely know me when he sees the above statements. was a very polite threat. hehehe, was close to showing him the finger. will surely do it soon. Send me some supporting replies, so i can build up the courage. hehehehe.

Come on people. here's a chance to motivate someone to do something for the mankind

There is a basic lack of understanding of the software development lifecycle (from requirements through to delivery).

Case in point being the 360 launch… you can't just launch when Marketing says when the whole system clearly wasn't ready…

Vodafone had a great team of developers,researchers, designers and UE experts mainly in Duesseldorf (Germany) but over time they were all made redundant and or are now led by below avarage managers without standing or vision (another guy who can't hold his spine up (thanks Storm)).
Everybody who's been in the business long enough knew, that H2 and M2 would again fail…another facebook client without commenting function (just to name one), no OpCo commitment and the previous bad press for H1/M1….

Its really sad to see. Parts of the Duesseldorf team worked on a so called “horizontal adressbook” in 2004…mindblowing- better than anything out there today even, but never released… a classic in Vodafone: higher management does not see the value of their teammembers and their ideas.

6 months from now, 360 will be gone too…

Myself, I just don't see this happening.