600 million? For a website?

Oh, the things I could do if my cat was paid 600 million dollars ... and I doubt she'd do worse ;)

And when I say the worst know that I lived through geocities.

Heh. I've had the Daily Sucker bookmarked for years.

I read on cnn dot com that during the recent shutdown, dot gov websites were closed purely on principle, independent of whether closing the site would cost more or less than leaving it open.

I do not think there has been another single website that is equally expensive, but the British government has wasted plenty.

The latest effort was the Department of Work and Pensions site which requires IE5, IE6, Netscape Navigator 7, Firefox 1, or "Mozilla" (I assume they mean Seamonkey) 1 running on Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP.

[dwp.gov.uk ]

No Windows Vista or later, no MacOS or Linux, and certainly no mobile devices.

In terms of proportional overspend, there was the "Business link" website which cost £35m a year for little more than a CMS and some content (most of which existed anyway) for a site which got about 15m visits a year. At least you are spending $600m on a complex website!

At least you are spending $600m on a complex website!

Oh, it's complex for sure, unfortunately there is no reason for it to be complex other than it's a gov-operation. It's more than a basic CMS, but not by much. After a series of database gets and inserts it's little more than an ad platform.

I was reading a story before posting this topic, in the story they noted that Apple only spent $150m developing the first iPhone, that for software, hardware, everything. The 2 main problems here are that 1. the gov is not a very good tech buyer, they don't have the required knowledge to buy tech, and 2. companies that can successfully get gov contracts are really only good and getting gov contracts and they are certainly not good at tech.

True, but its not just tech, although it is particularly bad in technology.

The British government's track record (with which I am most familiar) shows that it pays far too much for almost everything complex (by which I mean that either what they purchase is complex, or the terms of the deal are complex). That is why its efforts at saving money by outsourcing have been such as disaster.

Not only is it soooo bad but it was discovered a simple way to hack into a users account was soooo simple.
[money.cnn.com...]

I read somewhere yesterday the 600 million number is way off. Apparently it is way less than that but still a huge number.

No idea if it was just spin.

I read somewhere yesterday the 600 million number is way off.

Yeah, the numbers seem to be all over the place as to what has been paid out and what is still due. It's a typical hot.gov.mess though!

From the press release and testimony today:

"Over the past few weeks, millions of Americans have visited HealthCare.gov to look at their new health coverage options under the Affordable Care Act," Sebelius says. "In that time, nearly 700,000 applications have been submitted to the federal and state marketplaces from across the nation. This tremendous interest -- with over 20 million unique visits to date to HealthCare.gov

20 million visits and 700 000 sign ups.

What a fantastic conversion rate! ;-)

Not only that, they stole code to create the site. (Used without following the licensing)

[nationalreview.com...]