Microsoft's Bulk Deal With New Zealand Collapses

vik writes "The latest 3-year, pan-government deal that Microsoft has been establishing with the New Zealand government since 2000 has collapsed, opening the doors to the wider use of open source software in government. The NZ State Services Commission (already a prize-winning user of open source) says in a statement that it '...became apparent during discussions that a formal agreement with Microsoft is no longer appropriate.' Having lost their discount, individual government departments will now have to put their IT requirements out to tender individually."

Comments

Re:A small win, but MS has lobbyists

[morgan_greywolf]

1) MS is a powerful marketing organisation with a single control center. It has millions to spend on lobbying. Instead of one central purchasing order they will go after each state/county and government organisation parallely and independently

I agree to a point: I personally don't think that Microsoft has the domain knowledge to after individual provinces or localities in New Zealand, but then I may be underestimating Microsoft's presence in NZ.

2) To take advantage of this situation the FOSS/Open Source has NO marketing budget or marketing plan except for some backdoor geeks.

Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Mandriva, Sun, IBM, etc. all have marketing budgets. With the sole exception of IBM, none have as large a marketing budget as Microsoft, at least not by themselves.

3) Lobbyists that MS hires far outmatch the abilities of what FOSS can bring up....

There is no "open source lobbying" organization. ("FOSS" and "FLOSS" are ugly terms, IMHO). But certainly there are individual groups that, together, are extremely power, each from different angles. From the "online freedom" aspect, you have the EFF. From the "Linux is good" dept., we have The Linux Foundation. There are several organizations pushing open standards. IBM pushes open standards and open source. And there are tons of other examples. Together, these organizations outweigh Microsoft's lobbying efforts.

And there is no "we": Open source represents a bunch of diverse elements with diverse agendas. That's why open source is winning (yes, I said it: we are winning!). Many individuals and organizations with many agendas easily outweigh the one agenda and one organization, no matter how big or how much money said agenda and organization are.