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I think the article's tone is breathless and find the problems with the website predictable and boring (it also helps that I have insurance and barely need it).

I think the article's tone is breathless and find the problems with the website predictable and boring (it also helps that I have insurance and barely need it). But lots of people are angry about the new health care laws and are linking the laws with the excecutive branch's ineptness at website building, and trying to imply the two are related. Others just like reading about conflict and struggling against a problem, and getting "insider" information. The way this article is written helps both groups get that entertainment. I can't see anything useful about the article though. It's not clear what the website is trying to do, how it interacts with the insurance companies, or to get anything else out of the set of metaphors the author is using to try to describe a website. Has anyone found any good articles detailing the problems or, better yet, any description of how governments can create or have created successful websites, or how future administrations might approach creating a highly visible website?

sanderjd 13y ago
For what it's worth, I completely disagree. I think this episode has been incredibly interesting, as it's the first time that I've seen major news reporting about the realities of software engineering, which in turn means that it's the first time all the people I know outside the industry have had any insight into this sort of thing. Of course the article isn't useful, that's not what it's for. As a description of a problem that has affected people in terms that they may actually understand, I think it works pretty well. Hopefully we'll get some good detailed post-mortems eventually, but they certainly won't be in the newspaper.