Introduced in January 2007 at the role out of Windows Vista the site which was scheduled for April 2007 has become an engineering nightmare according to Sanity insiders. Now the site is being tested in Melbourne following the dumping of a UK development team.
Instead the two partners have turned to a Melbourne based team to deliver the site that will take on the likes of Apple, Telstra BigPond, Nokia and a planned Sony content site.
A Sanity source who has recently briefed industry partners on the site said "We are weeks away. It has been difficult for us because of early development and coding issues which were being undertaken in the UK. We dumped the UK developers and started from scratch here in Australia". They said.
Jeff Putt the Director of the Client Business Group at Microsoft and the man who initially announced the site "I cannot comment. This is commercially sensitive and I do not want to flag anything to our competitors".
