The government took way too long to get started "bending metal", it had the inexperienced/no experience on this scale HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services government bureaucrats be the integrator for this 50+? contractor effort, per the NYT "<i>In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times.</i>" (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327</a>), those changes continued through the last week before the launch, and full testing obviously was delayed until that last week. Underlying their inexperience, evidently CMMS didn't see a need for bottleneck monitors, given that we've heard of them being put in place post-launch.<p>And refused to listen to the people waving red flags started no later than spring of this year, when one of these bureaucrats changed his goal/desire from a "First World" website to one that wasn't "Third World"....<p>So the customer completely screwed up, including launching when the techies told them it couldn't possibly work. Add to that the usual inefficiencies of contracting, plus government contracting, I can't see how this project ever had the slightest chance of success. Especially with them now talking about a "<i>tech 'surge'</i>", obviously no one in authority has even bothered to read <i>The Mythical Man Month</i>"; I just don't see these people as being used to the hard constraints of the real world.<p>Subsequently, as related in that NYT article, CMMS appears to be quietly panicking (we've heard that independently: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572467" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572467</a>), and maybe not so quietly when per the NYT article they proposed 3 days after launch to through away the current identity system. Per that article, they have been consumed with working with the White House and hopes to have a plan for the contractors ready by Thursday; decisiveness is not part of their vocabulary.<p>So as things stand now, I wouldn't expect anything really working in 2014. I expect serious changes as this drags on for months, who know knows about 2014, but as for now....