So it seems the Obamacare website (the easy part, remember) still isn't up to the "works 80% of the time" standard.
Let's review reliability numbers, shall we?
99.999%, five nines: about the minimum you can get away with selling to a serious business that depends on your product or service (but where no lives are at stake).
99.9%, three nines: OK for many non-critical uses. Don't try to sell it for serious uses unless you have an effective monopoly.
99%, two nines: possibly acceptable for cheap consumer goods.
90%, one nine: broken.
80%, zero nines: not even broken.
Then, at the high end, we have the wonderful world of aerospace and medical equipment, where... well, how many failures are acceptable over the 30-year working life of an airliner or a deep-space probe, or during open-heart surgery? The teams that work on that stuff need to live reliability.
Of course, all these numbers really apply to hardware, even if there's also software involved. For software, if it ever fails, it's broken; we just put up with a certain amount of brokenness in the software that we use day to day (e.g., any known word processor or web browser). The question becomes, is it so broken that it's positively unusable, or is it merely inconvenient and infuriating on rare occasions?
Update: The Administration is positively boasting of one-nine availability.
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