Okay, first I have to get this out of the way — the best thing about John Tesh is that he is not doing Olympics gymnastics coverage this time around. If he was I really would hate the Olympics coverage.
Anyway, I’ve mentioned the content management system, Conversant, that powers this web site and marveled that it is both a) reasonably priced even for individuals such as myself, and b) extremely easy to use.
That’s quite an accomplishment considering there are a lot of very expensive systems out there that have a nasty reputation of being almost impossible to use. One system with such a reputation is Vignette’s StoryServer software. Tesh is suing Vignette after having what apparently is a common experience with StoryServer: he paid a lot of money ($210,000) and the software simply didn’t do what Vignette said it would. In fact some companies who have paid for StoryServer licenses reported spending as much to customize it to fit their needs as they did for the actual license (meaning they could have probably done their own system from scratch more cheaply).
As a story on the lawsuit from Inside.Com reports,
The suit further alleges that Vignette’s trainer said site development time with the software was six to eight months, with 12 to 14 months a possibility.
I don’t know about Tesh’s plans, but a 6 to 8 month lead time is basically business suicide on the Internet, especially since Internet technologies are likely to advance substantially in that 6-8 month time frame — whatever you end up with at that point is probably out of date and will need further extensive modification.