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Razorfish Sued For "Shoddy Web Site"
GusherJizmac writes "I know it's not totally on subject, but Razorfish is currently being sued over the website they did for IAM. IAM claims that "Razorfish breached the Agreement with IAM.com by delivering wholly inadequate deliverables and services." Could this set a precendent for the quality required for custom built software?" I dunno, maybe it's because of the time I spent working at a web design place, but this just seems funny to me. Update by RM 5:32 p.m. EST: link and typo corrected
Actual quote from the CEO of a company I used to work for ...
...and *NEVER* mention that it's written in perl. If they ask what it's written in, just say, 'The next version will be written in Java.'"
"Enterprise software is sold 100% on how well the Powerpoint presentation looks.
They also played nice little games like "Sales people are not allowed to say 'no' in response to 'Do you support X'" and "If they've given us a single penny, even if they bought a soda out of our vending machine while they were watching a demo, then they're a customer so we can use their icon on our website."
I looked at the code for the front page of the iam.com site, and I personally would never deliver such poor quality code to a client. I would be ashamed to put my name on it. At a quick glance, I saw errors in syntax, fundamental logic errors, and appallingly bad formatting of code. It doesn't work with browsers with Javascript turned off, it doesn't fail gracefully (it just dies without presenting a courteous message explaining the problem) and it doesn't work for a text-only browser (which means it could cause problems for the blind).
I know from experience that it's perfectly possible to make a modern, interactive web page with attractive DHTML features and still have it be compatible with Lynx and usable with a screen reader and deliver polite error messages to users with incompatible browsers. It's not even difficult.
If the iam.com site that I saw is the one they're suing over, I'm not surprised they're suing.
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function checkCookie () {
writeCookie ('mstrChck', 'hasyobrowsagotskillz');
return( readCookie ('mstrChck') == 'hasyobrowsagotskillz' );
}
Paul
I don't know the particulars of this case, I used to do work as a graphic artist. I remember customers demanding outrageous concessions as a condition of giving us the work. From people who walk in with a shoebox full of slides that needed scanning and expected to pick them back up in two hours to people who wanted custom 10 minute 3D animation sequences done(from concpetualization to final rendering) over a weekend.
If Razorfish met the conditions of the contract, they should be able to counter sue. People need to know that content designers will give you WHAT YOU ASK FOR and not necessarily what you want.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You know, they may have a point... that is a pretty shitty website. Totally disorganized, and ugly gfx.
I own a small Dev. hut, and if we pumped out shit like that, we would be out of business.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
According to the filing, Razorfish's contract requires the customer to accept or reject deliverables within five days. IAM claims that this provision is "unconscionable," and that latent defects and late delivery prevented it from learning about all of the site's alleged problems within the five-day period.
I'm not exactly sobbing into my beer because these bozos signed a contract containing provisions that they now have a problem with. Reading the contract (and I mean going through every bloody line) is essential in a business deal. I remember working for a company which was negotiating a deal with a client. We went back and forth with a contract, adding and deleting each time. We thought we were done and went to their city to sign it. They provided us with a cleaned-up 'final' copy and wanted it signed right then. We declined and took it back to our hotel room and went through it line by line, comparing it to our working copy. We discovered that the devious bastards had snuck in a provision for us to provide them free training. Moral: read the damned contract!
I think IAS ought to sue Hemos for causing their innocent-bystander website to be slashdotted.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
I'll admit I know nothing about the internal workings of this particular engagement, but I do know four things:
I just wonder who they'll be able to get for their next site redesign when they sue their previous agency for standard practices.
PS: An 'AOL 4.0 browser' is actually one of over 9 different browsers depending on platform, OS, and AOL whim.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
function checkCookie () {
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writeCookie ('mstrChck', 'hasyobrowsagotskillz');
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}
Looks like someone would rather have been hacking.
--
People need to know that content designers will give you WHAT YOU ASK FOR and not necessarily what you want.
I think this is a very large problem: A lot of companies don't know what they want. Are they supposed to bring someone in (a liason, of sorts) so that the company's web site contractees don't fuck up? Maybe they should.
Of course, as any company contracting out their web site should know, web sites aren't easy to make. Creativity has to be bought as an intangible asset. And sometimes one person's vision of good is another person's vision of shit.
Of course, navigation is either good, bad or ugly(bad times 10). Same with a shopping cart system. These things are implemented so regularly, it's a wonder people still fuck them up.
I think a good rule of thumb before going to a company to 'buy' a web site, is to SURF THE NET. Tell the designers: "I want this thing, but in blue" or "we want the whole site to be made of triangles". Restrict their creative movement, and you shall get what you want AND what you ask for.
rLowe
----- rL
I get a blank page. *ALL* of the content is inside an HTML comment.
You can't even get to the *FIRST PAGE* unless your browser has full JavaScript support.
That's pretty shoddy.
The table inside the comment just makes it more obvious that it's shoddy work; no one gave any thought to the structure of the page.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Fat load of good that does me if I don't have access to or want to use Javascript...
Oh wait, you mean like a page they made for somebody else? My god, people actually pay for this kind of crap?
:)
(Heh. Actually I interviewed with them and would have been perfectly happy to ignore the atrocity of their home site if it meant I could have lived in London for a few months, but it didn't work out and now I have no reason to stick up for their site. And that's too bad too, because they actually have some smart people working there. Not doing their own site apparently, but they are on the payroll... :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
How'd you like the website that you designed dissected into its component quarks by a planetful of generally-grumpy computer pros? The thought sends chills down my spine.
*braces for incoming karma hit*
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
This is small time stuff. The Big 6 (I think it's big 5 now) consulting companies do this all the time, and don't pay a dime, because they have lawyers, not programmers, detailing the deal.
:)
Once in a while, big companies like IBM, Anderson consulting or Price waterhouse get sued, but generally, they don't. Also, the failure rate for large scale projects of the scale undertaken by the big 5 is something over 50%. Ask anyone who has worked (as a programmer, not a manager) on these custom turn-key contract projects, and they'll tell you that in most cases, these companies do a really slick job of presentations/slides/drawing rectangles and flow-charts and generally throwing around industry buzzwords. These are invariably targeted at the VP and above level, and technical details are considered an afterthought. In a project I worked on, the partner of the software firm (a big 6 company) who presented and finalized a 20 million $ software deal was a lawyer.
Predicting whether the project was successfully done, and whether the company was held liable if it wasn't, is left as an exercise to the readers.
w/m
PS - I'm sure this isn't a rarity. Please post your experiences in cases like this. It's generally pretty hilarious.
- A mechanic was sued for the poor job he did on a client's car.
- A doctor was sued for the poor and unprofessional diagnosis he gave a patient.
- A building contractor was sued over the fact that the walls in the house he built just six months ago started cracking.
I don't really see any reason to sue here, but I do think that good work should be expected of web designers. Usually, where I work, the client is shown what is going on in the process, and things they don't like are changed, provided that their requests are reasonable.--
sounds like IAM is whining to me. If they were unhappy with the service, they should have said so during their "evaluation period" of five days. As far as razorfish submitting late work.. who knows? both sides probably share the blame. But IAM had five days - under the razorfish contract - to refuse the site, and they didn't.. they paid for it anyway, and later changed their minds.. so now their sueing..
is it me, or does it seem like companies sue each other for the press these days..
wish
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Yup. I could see that. Oracle invaded with a dozen developers and fancy titles, burned through money for two years and left.
With no product.
I left before Oracle gave up - but I had fought tooth and nail against them only because there was a product in place that was working fine with FAR fewer bells and whistles that Oracle wanted to slap on. It was written in Foxpro/TeleMagic, and *did* need to be replaced, but really had rather simple requirements.
Of course, it's not only the big guys that can screw the pooch hard on projects. The next guy in charge hired a VB developer to design the whole thing. The developer started coding, and then started popping up with questions like "what does this company do again?". That's when I knew IT there was screwed.
Guess what? They are still using the FoxPro/TeleMagic app. And it's working... just okay.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If they have any sense, they'll have professional liability insurance. For a company of our size, it's about $1.2K/year. Totally essential. For Razorfish, it'd be closer to $100K/year, I imagine. Still totally worth having, and it'll save their ass in this case.
Note: IANAIA. (I Am Not An Insurance Agent)
-Waldo
dear god, i'd be stunned if *any* company missed a deadline, but a SOFTWARE COMPANY!?!?!? Lord Jesus, say it ain't so!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
This should be a wakeup call for the hit and run web designer industry.
I've got a client whose websites are all hacked up e-commerce packages. Its really funny trying to navigate some of their internal sites. Everything has a shopping basket, and after you perform each action you procede to the checkout stand. This includes a website for inventory management and some basic groupware functions. To sign up for a meeting, you place it in your basket and check out. To retrieve your group's weekly work plan, you place the request in your basket and proceed to the check out function. To submit a helpdesk trouble ticket for a network problem, into the basket. When I have to find the list of open problems I cover, I have to add them to my basket before I can view them.
Despite a ton of complaints, most of the mangement think this is the only way the web can work. And the web developers skip out with a ton of money after a very short development cycle.
There are thousands of horror stories out there, its about time a company struck back at an incompetent group of web monkeys. With some legal prosecution of a few bad apples, the market will shake out the worst and web site design will become a little more sane.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
How'd you like to be the webmaster at IAS.com? Here you're suddenly hammered by a horde of slashdotters showing up, and you're going "What the f...?" Then you go over to SlashDot and find out that your site has been incorrectly linked in a story about IAM.com, but that everyone's saying, "yeah, that site really is a piece of feces. They oughta sue." Gotta ruin your day.
They are a fuckedcompany.
At least I have a new pick for this next week...
Well, since you cannot log in wiht out paying $$$ I don't think anyone can really say if it meets specs or not.
In my opinion I would never sign a contract to provide a web app that would work with any AOL browser. Maybe I'd have a page that would display to AOL users telling them to download IE or Netscape. But that's about it. It's not reasonable to specify neat multimedia and glitz that will view on, in my opinion, a substandard product.
Given the fact that the site was designed for a company that consists of agents and marketing people, I wouldn't doubt that the look, feel and specs of the web site was a moving target.
If it says in the contract that the website must work under AOL 4.0, then it must work under AOL 4.0 or they can sue. What if you paid for a house to be handicapped accessable and the didn't bother to put ramps for your wheelchair? You could sue that contractor as well.
It may be a grey area over what's "accessable" or not, but there are tons of similar lawsuits. This is a non-issue.
Maybe it's because Razorfish does big sites, but I wouldn't trust a web design company to make a site from scratch without checking in periodically.
:)
I think some of the fault here lies with IAM.com. Most companies like to see some sort of rough layout of a design before things proceed, especially on a big site. If IAM.com didn't stipulate that in their contract, then they goofed.
Of course, a web site is not a hamburger. Just because you have a site, doesn't mean that it is edible (ie. usable).
Also keep in mind that IAM.com probably paid 40-100k for this site. It's a crime how much web designers can charge for their (sometimes quite easy, comparatively) work. But Razorfish had a good rep. Now they don't.
rLowe
----- rL