How Healthcare.gov Doomed Itself By Screwing Startups | TechCrunch

The severity of the problems with the ACA Exchanges puts big government inefficiency on display. This piece argues that the nimble startup private sector may well have been in a better position to build and operate these exchanges.

Nevertheless, I suspect the most severe problems are to be found in the backend, connecting the various government legacy systems. Perhaps the exchanges are fatally flawed by the wrong systems architecture.

The fact that the CIA will spend $600 million with Amazon Web Services should be seen as a signal that big systems and big data may best be handled by smart people who can leap ahead of legacy systems many of which were designed in the last century

How Healthcare.gov Doomed Itself By Screwing Startups | TechCrunch: "These types of solutions will be entirely absent from California and New York. Ironically, the president’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, often espouses the principle of “Joy’s Law,” named for legendary founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, which states that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people in the world work for somebody else.” 

For a year, Park has been reorganizing the entire federal IT system to put data in the hands of private developers, rather than have government websites be the central hub. It is bizarre that the president’s signature initiative would ignore its own principles."

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal - NYTimes.com

This story in the NY Times, normally a strong supporter of this Administration, reveals that the the health portal rollout was and is a colossal failure. Meanwhile, TeamObama has obviously been lying to the American people about it, if we are to believe this story.

Having been associated with complex information technology systems over the years, I am not surprised.  This one is even more fragile because users are not trained in its use and had high expectations because of experience with other complex website that work.  This situation was made doubly worse because Administration officials failed to tell the truth and properly set expectations.

Thank God our military software systems are normally thoroughly tested before deployment and work as they should.

This mess is a direct result of the politics surrounding ObamaCare and the fact that so many people disapprove of it. The roll-out failure is sure to further drag down its popularity and rightly so.

Will it be soon that top Administration officials will be fired? I think it's likely that Secretary Sibelius will lose her job.

From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal - NYTimes.com: "Interviews with two dozen contractors, current and former government officials, insurance executives and consumer advocates, as well as an examination of confidential administration documents, point to a series of missteps — financial, technical and managerial — that led to the troubles."

'via Blog this'

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review: "­Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years."

I read Brynjolfsson and McAfee's book in 2011 and remain persuaded they are correct in their analysis. This piece in the MIT Technology Review is highly recommended reading and, of course, the hundreds of comments following in are equally insightful. Read the book if you have the inclination.

I am also convinced that nearly all our policy-makers and politicians are clueless about what to do about the job dislocations in the short term. Meanwhile, government policies are driven not by reality, but by perceived political power and gains. Traditional thinking that the Great Recession will end and things will improve for the U.S. based on past history is likely wrong, particularly so Keynesian economics which drives so much government policy and spending which does not produce the same results as previously. The fundamentals have changed.

Some experts argue (Harvard economist Lawrence Katz in this piece argues that this technological upheaval of the past two decades is merely part of a long term trend that began with the Industrial Revolution.) this is just a continuation of the technological progress of mankind

I think we are in a period of profound change driven primarily by advances in software and extremely capable and fast hardware that can mine and capture the value of 'Big Data.' The combination of technologies is creating capacity and capabilities that supplant the need for more and more human labor to produce goods and services that drive the economy.

"W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s intelligence systems lab and a former economics professor at Stanford University, calls it the “autonomous economy.” It’s far more subtle than the idea of robots and automation doing human jobs, he says: it involves “digital processes talking to other digital processes and creating new processes,” enabling us to do many things with fewer people and making yet other human jobs obsolete."

The wild card of course is that the negative effects of technology on jobs is seen mostly in advanced economies and less so in the underdeveloped world where manual processes prevail. The big question is will these countries and peoples grab the advantages of these advances in technology and raise their living standards or will religious, ethnic and cultural factors retard economic gains and better living conditions?

From the Story:

WHY IT MATTERS

Economic theory and government policy will have to be rethought if technology is indeed destroying jobs faster than it is creating new ones.

U.S. Outgunned in Hacker War - WSJ.com

 "Shawn Henry, who is preparing to leave the FBI after more than two decades with the bureau, said in an interview that the current public and private approach to fending off hackers is "unsustainable.'' Computer criminals are simply too talented and defensive measures too weak to stop them, he said."

'Open Source' and 'Secure Networks' in the same sentence seems, well, oxymoronish! Brilliant hackers seem always one step ahead of the white hats. My view has been that some white hats are also grey/black hats on their own time.

From the Desk of David Pogue - Should You Worry About Data Rot? - NYTimes.com

This interview is interesting, but the one question and answer that was passed over too lightly is about storing information online. It's true that some tiny Web 2.0 companies will go out of business and your data might not be safe with them. But other very large companies with staying power like Microsoft, Google, et al, seem to me a much safer bet for archiving material.

With millions of customers now, or about to be, storing terabytes of information online, it's highly likely that the information will be retrievable in the long term. Just don't lose your password! Perhaps that's an idea for a new service for a BIG company...storing passwords with extraordinarily secure encryption! I'd buy that service in a heartbeat with a reliable company for ~$10/year.

"Keeping it on the Web is also not a really great strategy. A very large photo site just went out of business, and they gave people, I think, a month's notice to say, "We've run out of money, get your photos off the site and put them somewhere." Web sites are fine for sharing, but in terms of preserving your data, I wouldn't recommend it."

From the Desk of David Pogue - Should You Worry About Data Rot? - NYTimes.com

Google to unveil 'Android' phone software | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Google to unveil 'Android' phone software Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Tom Krazit has written one of the most thoughtful pieces on the impending Google announcement about it's thrust into the mobile device software.

Here, I think, is the most important possibility that could evolve from Google's play:

"Google's stated open-source approach, or open net approach to life, is antithetical to the way cellular carriers look at the world," said Tim Hanlon, an executive vice president at Denuo, a consulting arm of advertising agency Publicis Groupe. Carriers are "loath to separate device from service. They're loath to let third-party applications play on their proprietary network."

If Google succeeds in opening up the industry it will be the biggest thing the search company has done in the last couple of years, said Stephen Arnold, author of The Google Legacy and a new book, Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. "The phone companies "don't understand the business Google is in, and now they're talking to them!"

Nevertheless, Microsoft will certainly not sit still and let the device manufacturers and software developers migrate en masse to Google.

I think one very important Google thrust behind everything they're doing recently is to capture the attention and energy of software developers while at the same time capturing mind-share of consumers with all their free, and excellent apps and tools. Their OpenSocial and Google Gears initiatives are current examples.

Here is another quote from a NY Times column by John Markoff.

“Instead of making money on software, you have someone who is saying they’re trying to make their money on services,” said Michael Kleeman, a technology strategist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California at San Diego. “The interesting question is whether the carriers will authorize the Google hand-sets on their networks.”

The battle will rage when/if Google makes its announcement on Monday, 11/4/07.