futuramb's crumbs

Philip Greenspun's Weblog » How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?

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). […] What am I missing?

This is really an important question, where the answer has huge implications for the future. The reason that traditional organizations spend so much on solving problems in general, and on IT solutions in particular, is what constitutes their main challenge. When small and young organizations, who is built on domain specific knowledge and bottom-up principles do something they are spending less resources by several magnitudes. And part from spending less resources on building the solution, the methodology and the lower threasholds to understanding the customer situation gives then a much higher probability of succeeding. They are simply closer to their customers and their problems. Modern organizations are not as hierarchical, mechanistic or has as many internal dependencies as traditional organizations and will never understand why it costs 40 million USD to build e g a paywall solutions. This is really the main challenge for traditional organizations like many newspapers publishers. And we haven’t even talked about if a paywall will really work or not…