Boo Hoo by Charles Drazin

Author:Charles Drazin [Ernst Malmsten , Erik Portanger and Charles Drazin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

10

WE NEVER DID choose a bank. The appropriate classical allusion was not Paris all, but Tantalus in the Underworld reaching for the bunch of grapes that vanishes just as he touches it. Indeed, even while we were being praised and courted in New York, I knew that the whole trip was an impossible dream – that we should have been pleased if any bank was prepared to work with us at all.

The day before our departure, 4 August, Luke Alvarez and Edward Griffith had met with Viant to hear its verdict on our technology platform.

They came up to my desk afterwards. ‘We need to talk about this somewhere quiet,’ said Edward, his anxious expression hinting at what was to come. So the three of us went out to the boo coffee shop just a couple of minutes’ walk from the office.

‘OK,’ I said, once we had sat down. ‘What did they say?’

While Edward concentrated with unusual intensity on stirring the sugar into his coffee, Luke looked at me with a gallows smile.

‘Well, basically, they think we’re fucked,’ he said. ‘Those were the exact words: “You’re fucked.”’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked, staring at Luke across the table.

‘They don’t think we can launch.’

‘At all?’ I was becoming sceptical. Luke was prone to exaggeration when he wanted to make a point.

‘What they said,’ Edward interjected, ‘is that we probably can’t launch for quite a while.’

‘Nine months,’ Luke added. ‘They think the whole way we’ve gone about building the platform is flawed. They think we should go back to investors, ask for more money, and start all over again.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Basically, they think we’re fucked.’

As I tried to take this in, Edward and Luke took turns in explaining the details of Viant’s initial findings. Systems architecture, the user interface, product data, the application development process – there were huge problems in pretty much all these areas. Our overall project management was a disaster too. We were now working with eighteen different technology companies who were scattered throughout the world. What they needed was a central architect – someone tough and disciplined who could co-ordinate what they were doing, but it was probably too big a job for any one person to handle – especially in such a tight timeframe. I was starting to wish we’d stuck with Ericsson all those months ago.

‘The main problem is that we don’t have any version control,’ Luke said, pointing at the appropriate paragraph in Viant’s two-page summary of their initial findings. Most early versions of a website, it noted, had bugs in them. The process of fixing these bugs, it went on, would sometimes create new ones. The only way of controlling this, and tracing problems back to where they’d started, was to work on the website in small, carefully documented stages. ‘You need to build and test, build and test,’ said Edward, who was reading over my shoulder. And in doing so, it was vital to have a central system

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