In an article about Scrabble applications on facebook, Erik Schonfeld of TechCrunch noted that Electronic Arts has been working on an official Scrabble application for six months, and intends to launch later this month.

Six months!?

A designer and a coder should be able to make a Scrabble application in a week, two at most. The functionality is a no-brainer, the user experience design work is mostly straightforward, and the graphic design work isn’t worthy of a yawn. There are open source versions of Scrabble if, for some reason, the coding proves difficult. EA has thousands of talented employees who want to do nothing else but make the best games in the world. And to top it all off, EA mobile released a Scrabble app almost a year ago, so most of the work was already done.

So why couldn’t they throw together a simple facebook application in a reasonable amount of time?

I suspect that in this case, it took some time to negotiate licencing terms with Hasbro. But this is not an excuse so much as a different type of failure.

I also suspect that the risk-adversity of listed entities such as EA precludes them from shipping imperfect products early. But that’s not a good enough excuse for EA here. After 6 months it doesn’t matter how great the product is, they’ve already lost.