The Biggest Tech Mishap of 2013?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Some high-profile tech initiatives really crashed-and-burned this year. Did BlackBerry executives really think that BlackBerry 10 would spark a miraculous turnaround, or were they simply going through the motions of promoting it? That's the key question as BlackBerry 10 devices fail to sell. Then there's Facebook's misbegotten attempt at 'skinning' the Android OS with its Home app. Or maybe Healthcare.gov counts as 2013's biggest debacle, with its repeated crashes and glitches and inability to carry out core functions. What do you think was the biggest software or hardware (or both) mishap of the past twelve months?"

Comments

Not really by a mile

[eclectro]

The political consequences will last for years. Coming soon: the doctor shortages.

Spoken like a true TeaParty ideologue. While the initial rollout of healthcare.gov was an unmitigated mess, the recovery will in time be recognized as one of the greatest tech successes. The initial design goal was for the website to be able to accommodate 50,000 simultaneous visitors. On Monday December 23rd the website was supporting 83,000 concurrent users. About 2 million people have enrolled into healthcare plans, 1.1 million through healthcare.gov. Quite a substantial number from those six people that enrolled the first day!

Regardless of what you think of the individual mandate or health care reform, that is a remarkable tech turn around - taking millions of lines of pre-alpha code in October to production status by the end of the year. Here is a short video interview with New Relic, one of the companies behind the turnaround.

For all the bad politics our government might have, do not underestimate its propensity to solve a technical problem.