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America's New CIO Loves Google
theodp writes "On Thursday, Barack Obama tapped Vivek Kundra for the post of Federal CIO, giving him responsibility for establishing and overseeing enterprise architecture across the federal government. So what might that look like? Well, little more than a month ago Kundra was slated to sing the praises of Google Apps to government officials in a webcast. A Kundra quote from the presentation slides: 'Why should I spend millions on enterprise apps when I can do it [with Google] at one-tenth cost and ten times the speed? It's a win-win for me.' You can follow Kundra's love affair with Google on YouTube, from his announcement of the Google-Washington DC partnership he brokered through a co-starring role with a Google attorney on a video pitching Google-enabled technology for the Obama Administration. Not surprisingly, some say Obama's choice of a Google-party-goer who worships Google could cause big headaches for Microsoft."
I for one have a problem with our government documents and processes being hosted by a private company. At least Microsoft just sells software.
"Not surprisingly, some say Obama's choice of a Google-party-goer who worships Google could cause big headaches for Microsoft."
Man, that's just terrible news.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I work in the intelligence community, and I have to say we are way behind the commercial side in application development and other IT areas. We spend millions in development of programs that can't begin to match free programs available on the internet like Google Earth. Open Source to us means unclassified information; hardly anyone is aware of Linux, Open Office, or other open source solutions. Having someone who is not beholden to government contractors can only be a good thing. And I say that as a government contractor.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
We already use Google Earth on our classified networks, quite extensively actually. The kml is quickly becoming the file type of choice for geospatial information, replacing the shapefile (shp) used in ArcGIS.
What's to stop us from using some of their other applications as well?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Why is he talking about saving money. This is the time we need to be thinking about spending. We are proposing a trillion plus dollar budget and this guy is talking about win-win situation. Tax payers have lot of money. As soon as you get to a govt position where you have some decision on spending, you need to start treating Tax payers as ATM machines. That should be the litmus test for becoming a govt. employee. This CIO seems to fail in that regard. I ask all of you call your representatives and senators to push for firing of this guy. Thank you all and God Bless the USA.
It seems every third comment is along the lines of... "do we really want our data on a private companies servers?"
Get a clue, what this guy might do is switch the government to government owned servers running google software. Right now, my email, on the DHS network, is pulled from an exchange server... MS does not own the server. The great thing about google's code is that it would scale much better than anyone else's, eliminate the need for client software on individual workstations, and prevent users from storing mail locally on their machines (archive pst's) as is so commonly done now with the tiny mailboxes and huge attachments that inexperienced users are so fond of sending around here. Because each exchange server has it's own mail store, an attachment could exist on every mail server in our organization... while on google, an attachment is stored very efficiently and only on multiple servers for redundancy purposes.
My vote is for google code on government owned equipment... it would be by far the most efficient and cost effective solution.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I'm okay with Google just taking over the whole government, really. They seem to run things pretty well. Hell, scrap income taxes and make it all add-supported.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Mr. Ballmer, is that you?
Why if they were power hungry, they would be
Yeah, thank God that Google is not that bad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I, the customer, am responsible for that job. The customers can make companies rich and big, if I like their product. I want the government to be fair to all companies. Just be neutral.
No. I mean, yes.
In an ideal world, it would be great if the government could be completely neutral to every company out there. They could take parts from every company and use them to build their infrastructure and everybody would be happy.
In an ideal world, though, we'd all be rich and nobody would ever fight or say bad things to each other.
The fact of the matter is, Google does a great job at what it does - manage information. At the end of the day, the government, as a voice for the people, has to make the best decisions it can given what it knows at that time. In my personal opinion, Google is an excellent choice for helping the government to set up an infrastructure and manage the data of the government. And, heck, if it actually saves taxpayers money, all the better.
He's the CIO for the Federal government. The Federal government is not America, despite its constant attempts to completely and utterly replace it with itself.
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