But in failing to finish it, they pushed the government to better understand technology. During this time, they began to seek permission from their own federal sub-agency to use a technology that will seem basic to programmers but which Healthcare.gov had not previously used in any way: Amazon Web Services.
.. So during those early months, working side by side with the tech surge, MPL began to improvise. They figured out that they could use Akamai, a cloud provider that already had the government’s blessing, to launch static websites that handled complex functions in the user’s browser, rather than on an exterior server.
.. Around the middle of 2014, the MPL team got key federal government contacts—including the testing team—to use Hipchat, a group chatroom similar to Slack.
Switching to a chat client represented a huge improvement over “these huge email chains, with all these attachments,” Yu said. It also allowed small offices within CMS, such as the Healthcare.gov testing team, to quickly shoot questions and clarifications to the MPL team.
.. In interviews, many of them repeated the same idea: that leading by example, technologically, made people more likely to try new methods than simply saying, “hey, we should all do this.”
.. The government’s method of running software turned on a sequential design strategy known as “the waterfall”: a central calendar, the Gantt chart to end all Gantt charts, that promulgated when every task would finish. The government tried running software development as a bureaucratic process, with project managers managing project managers, and the whole thing broke.
.. The team instead worked in an “agile” way, which favors small, cross-disciplinary teams that stay in close communication with each other while quickly finishing iterative improvements to a product (often software).
The government was eager to embrace agile methods, but it didn’t always understand them.
.. “And I’m like, how is that agile? That’s a three-month plan—down to like, a plan every day of those three months. ‘What if you learn something on like the third week that changes the rest of the plan?,’” Yu remembers asking. “And they were like, oh, well it’s the rest of the plan, so it can’t change.”
.. “There’s whole tiers of organizations especially in these large contracting organizations that do nothing but manage the schedule, so if the schedule is slipping, that’s their highest alarm bell going off,” Bhobe says.
.. Where the previous version required a user to flip through some 76 pages, App 2.0 uses, at most, 16.
.. “The thing about needs is, you don’t mix the solution with the need, so you actually say, this is a need we need to solve. And you use the creativity and the energy of the team to figure out what the best way to address that might be,” he told me.
.. It also indexed family members by presuming everyone would have a unique birthday—meaning twins couldn’t both have accounts.
..But the MPL team’s experience hints that contractors, or at least their government supervisors, were less actually using agile methods than aping its lingo. Team members found the government averse to the agile process because, to quote Yu, they asked, “what if there’s bugs?”
Government Backdoor – The Clipper Chip – flawed
The final nail in the coffin came after Matthew Blaze, then a 32-year-old computer scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories, discovered a flaw in the Clipper system that would have allowed anyone with technical know-how to get access to the key to encrypted communications.
.. Leading technology companies, including Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, have been moving to transient messaging plans that dispose of the encryption key to customers’ messages once their session ends.
An Advance May Double the Capabilities of Fiber Optics
The researchers said they had set a transmission record for a fiber-optic message, sending it more than 7,400 miles in a laboratory experiment without having to regenerate the signal.
.. Such a network would be significantly less expensive and could carry more data. So far, the researchers have been able to increase the power of the lasers twentyfold to achieve transmissions over far greater distances, he said.
Benedict Evans wants you to know that Google is a tiny company
So what does Benedict Evans see? “Technology has outgrown the tech industry,’ he says. “You’re going from companies that sell technology to companies that are using technology to build entirely new businesses.” Another way to think about it, and this is one of Evans’s central skills—the illuminating analogy—is to think about McDonald’s or Walmart as corporations that were not trucking companies but would not have been possible without the growth and sophistication of the logistics and trucking industries.
.. Chen and the folks at a16z recognize that mobile is a market ten times bigger than the internet. But Evans is the one who can put that into real numbers. “The revenue of the mobile telecom industry is $1.2 trillion,” Evans reels off. “And the revenue of all of online advertising is about $120 billion.”