I dont like to be the one defending disney.. but I want to shime on this.
We do not know if these 2 billion were exclusively for MyMagic (app and FP+ systems)
I'm pretty sure the majority of the money went to upgrade the aging infrastructure.
We're talking computers, networks, servers, access points, installing the kiosks, developing the apps and unity the infrastructure and older tech to work on the newer one.
Making such massive investment isnt cheap. specially considering the number of hotels, and the cheer size of Disney.
Right, but that is what makes it the IT boondoggle of the century.
Yes, WDW is vast - but come
on. That's enough money to build the technical infrastructure of a small nation.
And Disney isn't doing anything new or revolutionary. RF technology is all around us and cheap. And while it seems like some major feat to organize that many hotel and dining reservations, in terms of things like database load, etc. - the size of WDW should not be a problem, many companies process many more records per day (think of a credit card company that gets 100's of millions of transaction records
per day).
That's not to say it was simple - quite the contrary, as an IT job, it was very difficult - any unfortunately typical. TDO did what so many companies do - they waited way too long to do something about an aging IT structure, with systems that were never designed to last this long, and that cannot interface with each other because they were never designed to. I wouldn't be surprised if their initial goal before this snowballed was simply to have guests not notice the change at all.
Based on the evidence and how long it took, and what happens almost every time, I'm pretty sure that this started as an idea to come up with some overall system to integrate them. It's a fool's errand. Even when it "works", it almost always doesn't. There are always compromises, and it just depends on how much you can accept. They also suck up IT resources like a banshee even when they are "live" and "completed" - because you need to keep full, experienced teams there because some unhandled exception is going to constantly come up because connecting these old systems and building a way for them to communicate to each other is a technical house of cards. Many companies can't handle those compromises and end up abandoning very costly work to start over from scratch.
Then it also seems, in classic Disney fashion (and again, most businesses of that size), "who's gonna pay for all this?" once they realize how big the job is. That's when the proverbial bean counters started finding places in the company to siphon it from, which means those departments need a piece of it to benefit them, and this thing spiraled out of control.
If Disney had just wanted to create an integrated package to manage all their reservations, etc., it could have been done for a tiny fraction of the cost and we wouldn't even have known about it. And as far as data/network stuff goes, again, Disney isn't really huge potatoes there - in the end, they are just sending textual data around, even ancient Ethernet far out paces their needs, and we all know how cheap and ubiquitous wireless is for the places it's applied. Even the added RF stuff, which I am sure bloated some of that cost, should not cost that much money.
So again, I'm sure it was a difficult job, but when we talk infrastructure/etc. - remember, we are just talking about frigging computer code. The physical changes that had to happen were only a fraction of the cost. I mean, if we wanted we could probably price it all out and come up with a good estimate, since how many stores, restaurants, attractions, etc. needed to be outfitted across the resort. I'm confident it could have been done without getting into the 10-figures. This reeks of an IT black hole where if they had just done what they ended up having to do in the first place, it would have cost a fraction of what it did. And I don't even blame IT - I blame management that didn't have the foresight to not have them running around trying to do things that could never be done.
