Comment by cyberax
14 hours ago
> Can you imagine raising $288 million from VCs for a software application while delivering so little?
What? You're imagining VCs caring about pizza money? Should I mention, perhaps, the AOL-TimeWarner merger? Or maybe AT&T buying DirecTV for $50B and essentially giving it away for $8B?
Heck, I was a part of an utterly failed project with a $150m budget (in 2005), in a large European company.
> For the main system they're also using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.
And? They haven't missed a single payment day in all their existence, moving data between multiple types of media. While working with staff levels that won't even qualify as "skeleton" in plenty of companies.
> Heck, I was a part of an utterly failed project with a $150m budget (in 2005), in a large European company
Was it a just a somewhat complex CRUD app like the SSA example or most govt IT projects? Or were you guys trying for something more complicated and innovative and failed?
It was an ERP application from a large three-letter European company. In other words, a CRUD app with lots of UI forms. Nothing innovative or particularly interesting.
The hardware to deploy it was alone a couple of million. At least, I got to play with some rather cool gear (for that time).