German readers may be familiar with the story of Arbeitsagentur.de, the official website of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Federal Labour Office). It's a fairly typical "big business" story: government wants a job portal website, large consulting company (Accenture) bids €65.5M, government accepts, consultants start it but say they need another €100M to complete it, government becomes outraged, news stories are written (like this one), and eventually a horribly slow low-functionality website gets built.

But there's something I just can't wrap my mind around with stories like this. Why do people get outraged with a job portal website costing 160,000,000+ euros? Don't they realize how much enterprise is bundled with a price like that? Can't they understand that the slowness and poor usability is key part of enterpriseness and, that this is actually a good thing?

Well I hope that I can set the record straight today and give Accenture the credit they are due. It's impossible to explain the value behind a €160M+ website in such a small space, but I think that Wladimir Palant found the perfect example that you can actually check and see for yourself (view source on arbeitsagentur.de). It's a 714-byte session identifier that's unique enough to represent all sessions across all websites across all the Internets across all galaxies throughout all of time ... four times over. Now that's enterprisey ... 

<a href="/berufe/search/alpha/index.jsp;jsessionid=000000000000001a49444c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_1CA157F9330F6E6F373F6BE19
C19812C" tabindex="600" class="mainmenu">
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