Jeff Walker Could Have Saved The Health-Care Website

Today's WSJ front-page headline is "Software, Design Defects Cripple Health-Care Website" (see story here). Almost three years ago, I nominated Jeff Walker to be the #3 man on my Cyber Privateer Fantasy League (see the nomination here). The key paragraph in the piece follows:

Jeff wrote a seminal document called The Principles of the Perfect Application, in which he enumerated twenty-two concepts that no application has ever achieved (not even his TenFold platform). While doing research for a sequel novel (all of us ad guys are really closet novelists), I reviewed his document. It slowly dawned on me that with the addition of very few new principles, Jeff had created a platform for the Ultimate Virus. I also think it would be the Ultimate Cyber Privateer Toolkit.

Jeff's original 22 principles for the perfect application remains the most brilliant treatise on creating major applications that run perfectly right out of the box. Design defects are an impossibility. Nobody else has ever come even close to articulating his application development architecture, let alone implementing it. Today, there are a handful of companies who use Jeff's technology to seriously consternate anybody trying to compete with them (England Trucking, Devon Way, and Remedy Informatics to name just three). Remedy Informatics in particular could have developed and fielded a scalable/bullet-proof health-care website without even breathing hard. Clearly though, they weren't wired into the "Beltway Bandit" procurement network that has a lock on selling $1,000 toilet seats to the U.S. government.

It is Jeff Walker to whom I owe the insight and inspiration for the 22 Principles of the Perfect Virus (see them all here). Gary Kennedy, former president of Oracle and CEO of Jeff Walker's TenFold, could have made the difference here. Unfortunately, the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers obliterated TenFold's two largest customers and sent the company into an unrecoverable tail spin. Jeff and Gary, both independently wealthy from their days at Oracle and both off doing their own things now, could have made a difference, not only in the implementation of healthcare, but in every other cybernetic domain on the planet. That they didn't remains one of the great ironies of my life.

Taman Shud.