More on the Obamacare Fiasco - It's Not Windows 8

John Fund has an excellent article up on the IT problems with the Obamacare website, and the unlikelihood that they'll be fixed anytime soon.   Here's the chilling part:

The administration may also know less than it is claiming to know. It is astonishing that Zients, after only three days on the job, could make the assurances he did without having conducted a full technical review of the system, including requirements, architecture, design, and implementation. The scope of Healthcare.gov is staggering. Its 500 million lines of code dwarf the size of almost all known IT projects. According to CNN Money, it took just half a million lines of code to send the Curiosity rover to Mars. Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system has some 80 million lines of code. And a typical online-banking system might feature between 75 million and 100 million lines.

So the healthcare.gov website is roughly six times the size of Microsoft's Windows 8.   Hmmmm... I wonder how long it took Microsoft to develop that system?

WELL, THE FACT THAT THEY CALL IT WINDOWS FREAKIN' 8 OUGHT TO GIVE YOU A CLUE!   They had seven earlier versions over a couple of decades in which they progressively worked out problems and added features.   And then there's this from the Wikipedia article on Windows 8:

Windows 8 is a personal computer operating system developed by Microsoft as part of Windows NT family of operating systems. Development of Windows 8 started before the release of its predecessor, Windows 7, in 2009. It was announced at CES 2011, and followed by the release of three pre-release versions from September 2011 to May 2012. The operating system was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, and was released for general availability on October 26, 2012.

So, basing it on an existing program developed over decades of testing and patching and fixing and adding features, it still took the world's most sophisticated and powerful software company more than three years to develop Windows 8.   But CGI Federal was supposed to develop a project six times bigger in less than a year?

What senior executive signed off on that lame idea?   The Board of Directors wants to know so we can give him a pink slip.  

Oh, yeah... now I remember.