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Comment by mtrimpe | Hacker News Reader

From what I can tell it looks like a fairly decent deal.

The site is snappy, visually impressive and with a well thought out user experience, tasteful upsell and in general clear communication.

At least it launched and managed to avoid all the pitfalls of corporate politics leading to bad architectural choices leading to a very expensive and poor implementation, which is a much more difficult challenge by itself than most people realize.

It's important to remember that:

* very few great developers/designers will work for Four Seasons on the cheap.

* it'll mostly have been well paid consultants earning $100/hr and up

* it is very likely that the project has had multiple iterations to reach it's current state, all hidden behind a single big release.

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Try deactivating JavaScript and look at the page. For $18M i would expect something else.

Guys, why the downvote? Upvoted to counter. It was a fair argument.

Try W3C validation! How dare they cash $18M and not even produce valid HTML..

Seriously now, what is it, 1999?

There are people who deactivate JS, for personal/corporate/whatever reasons. Shouldn't one serve these customers as well? Or does this feature cost another $1.5M ?

Those people are in the extreme minority. They are not worth the time and effort.

Granted, there are people who deactivate JS for whatever reason.

The intersection of "people who deactivate JS" and "The addressable market of Four Seasons Hotels" is likely small enough that the lost potential sales wouldn't even cover the cost of development.

Catching deactivated JS is not really big, in terms of development costs. But especially companies like "Four Seasons" are usually the ones that live by "Every missed customer is one too many".

And i dont think that money was an issue in this project.

Except that the cost is near zero if you approach it right. It also means supporting many mobile browsers that usually break js and providing a better experience on slower connections (3g, edge, whatever).

There's a specific touch optimized site that works for mobile. It doesn't look like it or the iPad optimized site are done yet either since they redirect to preview.fourseasons.com, but they're definitely aware of mobile devices.

I just moved here, so I'm getting to know the neighbours. One of them had a wi-fi problem. It turns out his TP-Link admin interface relies on JavaScript to function. He uses the No-Script Firefox extension. He's a retired chairman of a PVC company, who moved to the Canary Islands for his sabbatical. Judging by the house, he's part of the addressable market.

I think it makes sense that high-value employees with access to sensitive information get basic cybersecurity education. Therefore, some of them block JavaScript.

In general web developers seem to kowtow to the most to ridiculous compatibility requirements--how many still fret about IE6 and IE7 compatibility?

In no other industry do consumers get that kind of luxury. It'd be like the music industry putting new releases on cassette tapes for the people who haven't upgraded to CD or MP3 yet.

I like that analogy. The path to upgrade is also effortless and free.

Tell that to the corporate IT people who manage thousands of workstations and support internal intranets that were designed around those older browsers.

They can very well keep ie6 for cruftmaster97(tm) but they could provide chrome or firefox to browse the 2012 internet. I know some people call their browser "the internets" but it is in fact just a regular application that you can install as many of as you like. Kinda like if you said we can't use Latex for our yearly report even though you could create all diagrams and tables directly out of the database because we already have a publishing software installed. Word. Wait, that is exactly what IT would say.

Yeah, and those who intentionally deactivate their JS know how to turn it back on for a site they trust.

Seriously. I'm all for being compliant for most users, but accommodating for users who actively gimp their browser is a little ridiculous when they probably represent less than 5% of their users. You have to expect that some sites just aren't going to work.

Google doesn't validate either and they spent a lot more than $18M.

Try using it in IE5 and look at the page. For $18M i would expect something else.

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