The Joel on Software Discussion Group

I give you some data:
- it took some 3 years from idea to implementation
- it costed 45 million euros
- it's made by IBM
- it's supposed to promote tourism to Italy

Feel free to express your feelings :)

Mama Mia!

It's a filter to ensure they only get quality tourism. Any lowlife with a dialup connection gives up before he reaches Luton.

Did that 45 million euros include budget for someone with a first-grader level of comprehension of the Japanese language?!  The bottom newsletter language selection bar says  English  |  Deutsch  |  Français yadda yadda | and then "Japanese".  Except, whoops, it DOESN'T say Japanese.  It says something to the incoherent effect of "Alright, lets sell".

And it only works properly in IE, not Firefox. Way to go IBM

Very good sales people!

I checked out the page, and the entire source code was "". Wow! I was impressed!

Who are those sales people and how can I hire them? I'll bid 40 million on the project! :)

Then I tried again, and it actually loaded in less than 5 minutes... And there was a page there! A real page with text and graphics and stuff! WOW! Impressive!

Ummm... Can we say "government money"?

Do they have capital punishment in Italy?

Ah yeah i forgot, the logo alone costed 100000 euros! Yeah, i mean the ugly logo with the black "i" and the green "t" shaped like Italy. But that i'm not sure who did it.

Cool for IBM.

At least it's online, the sponsors might be thinking. Web sites generally work, however broken they might be. It eases the "agility" of development, always having a working core of some sort.

It should be a success formula for getting money out of governments.

Oh, their Chinese is great too.  The page is marked as UTF-8 but it sure as heck isn't and if you try to read it like that you get gibberish.  IE, being smart enough to try to recover from this, from attempts to guess at the language from the first few non-Western characters it detects in the file.  Thats Japanese due to an alt attribute on a 1x1 img.  I know EXACTLY the process that got an alt attribute placed on a 1x1 image, because it happened at work this week -- someone said "Hey, our page needs to be accessible.  Accessible means ALT on everything!  Because blind Chinese need helpful descriptions in Japanese to tell them that the transparent 1x1 image used for spacing means 'Skip to the main content'".

The links for the English, French, Spanish, Russian and Japanese versions all point to the English version.

And on a Mac with Safari or Firefox I get a blank page.

Yay for "portals" and government contracts.  At my last position a gov't contractor spent more than SEVEN YEARS implementing an internal portal for a single office of a department.  It never went anywhere, and is still being "developed."  So much money, no results.  Such is the way of the gov't contract.

I get nothing. Is the traffic from JoS bringing down the server?

Oh, and I know a certain university that paid over a million dollars for a 3-letter logo.

==>I get nothing. Is the traffic from JoS bringing down the server?

It's slower than doggie-doo-doo on my machine. The home page took about 55 seconds to load and I've been waiting about the same for the "English" page to load. Looks like it's gonna time out on me.

I don't know 'bout y'all, but if I spent 45 million (anythings <euros, dollars, whatever>) I'd expect it to handle just about any load that could hit it. I'm calling it a 45 million euro waste of money at this point.

It works on my Fireofox, but I had to reload it when I first entered it. But it's slooooow.

Looks like a good entry for The Daily WTF.

Pretty layout. URLs are too long, can't be emailed properly. Extremely poor copywriting. "Enogastronomic itineraries?" What? Why not instead say "Food tours" or "Culinary tours" or "For Italian-food mavens" or something? Bullshit-free copy is excellent search engine optimization: use the words _users will search by_.

Extremely poor ROI overall. Fails to achieve basic objectives of any website that tries to sell an idea, a product, or anything: I don't know when this content was created or by whom. Who's behind the site and what's it really all about (what are the motives of the people behind it)? What's going on with it? Can I rely on the claims this site makes? Where can I go for further information? These are the questions websites must provide easy, obvious answers to.

Here's an idea for how to do something like this on the cheap:

- Bulk import appropriate educational text from Wikipedia (it being Creative Commons-licensed), applying minimal editing as needed - hire an Internet-savvy liberal arts major with a flair for travel/Europe/whatever who needs a writing/editing gig. Instant valuable, informative, authentic content.
- Turn the entire thing into a community-oriented site where people who have been to Italy can connect with people who want to go - swap photos, stories, tips, etc.
- Run it on any one of the megajillionzillion $0 CMSes/community software packages out there and use other free software packages to create a $0 web stack that only takes one person to administer
- Establish and cultivate relationships with existing online expat/travel communities prior to launch

4-8 months to launch, 5-7 people at most. Post-launch would only require a community liason/moderator type and a tech maintenance person. Maybe not as appealing to business types or people on this forum who hate anything that's different (community? people don't go on the Internet to connect with each other, that's why MySpace is a failure!), but definitely way cheaper, and it couldn't possibly be less likely to succeed than this pretentious brochureware site which is circa-1996 in its assumptions.

<quote>
It works on my Fireofox, but I had to reload it when I first entered it. But it's slooooow.
</quote>

Funny, same behavior here. I have to say that I am impressed with the italian sales people.

But it might be the way things are where I live. The government has bought many Windows and Office licenses (the price was way beyond current market price) so it can fix official figures of pirated MS software from 90 something % to decent 70%.

I mean, perhaps every italian citizen has a Tivoli cracked so in return ...

At: http://www.italia.it/wps/portal/en_enroll

The country box lists Antarctica as an option.

Do companies like IBM really add anything to the world, or is it just dead weight?

In a bit of twisted irony, IBM may have some ROI on top of the $ they got for the contract. The website promote's IBM's Easy Web Browsing software. Oh, and of course, the screenshot is of IBM's website.

One question to the original poster: how do you know that it costed 45 million Euros? Can you give links, references or otherwise cite your sources?

Regards,

      Shlomi Fish

Some references:

for those of you who read Italian:
http://www.repubblica.it/2006/c/sezioni/cronaca/porfan/porfan/porfan.html

English resource here:
http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/2006/03/the_portal_that_disappeared.html

Marco Cantu's (Delphi guru) coverage in English:
http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/italian_portal.html

Can't find anything better right now, but it's all over the place on Italian media (and rightfully so!). Also the numbers must be public somewhere since it's been sponsored by the Italian government.

Lorenzo, this is exactly why I left Italy. It's such a joke.

> for those of you who read Italian

That's from March 2006, sayng that the site was announced but doesn't exist.

A shocking disgace.

I was so frustrated I clicked on "navigator" too see a site map.

But "navigator" was actually a pop-up map of Italy. That didn't allow scrolling navigation..

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH

And the headings are all the same. Which do I click if I want to see what Italy has to offer?:

Visit Italy
What to do
Itineries
Events
Plan your trip

CHOOSE ONE ONLY

@Christopher

yes it's from last year, it just confirms about the 45 millions

Che Cavolo e?

> Feel free to express your feelings :)

Sad at so much money spent for so little return, and happy that Italy is better than that.

Have a laugh!

http://tinyurl.com/2xexea

The Vice President of Italy and Minister of Cultural Heritage Francesco Rutelli presents the new portal on tourism in Italy, italia.it.