For some weird and unexplainable reason, people normally expect better services from private companies than from their own governments. This is not the case for our citizens in Estonia. https://qz.com/1535549/living-on-the-blockchain-is-a-game-changer-for-estonian-citizens/
@yogthos I met a lot of officials from Estonia when I worked on implementation of electronic signature in Poland. There are many factors to their success, but the main is -- they have 1.5m citizens. Doing a project for 1.5m citizens is hundreds of times easier than doing it for 40 or 80m citizens. The latter is possible, but requires much higher skills.
@kravietz sure, but a country of 80 million obviously has more resources than a country of 1.5 million as well. And the cost of scaling is not linearly correlated with the population increase for obvious reasons.
@yogthos A surprising fact about public sector is that the cost is indeed non-linear, but it's negatively correlated to the population size ;) Reasons explained in the other comments.
@kravietz [citation needed]
@yogthos did you? ;)
@kravietz I'm saying that cost of technology doesn't rise linearly with the number of users. This is not a controversial statement for anybody working in tech sector. If that was the case no tech companies could ever scale.
You're saying that something fundamental changes with tech being developed in public sector, and I don't see that happening myself.
I used to work in the private sector and now I'm working in the public one. The bureaucracy and efficiency are very much comparable.
Public sector has one distinctive feature: it's much more risk averse as compared to the private sector.
This is understandable since every failed project is met with a concerted hysteria in the media because it's "public money".
@yogthos This I can only agree.
@kravietz yeah and I think this is where private sector can provide value, but it can also create problems in the long term when they grow.
One model that could work is to have a law that allows the government to buy out a company that's considered an essential service at market price.