Google Sues US Gov't For Only Considering Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes "Late last week, Google sued the US government for putting out a Request For Quotation for the messaging needs of the Department of the Interior that specified only Microsoft solutions would be considered. Google apparently had spent plenty of time talking to DOI officials to understand their needs and make sure they had a solution ready to go — and were promised that there wasn't a deal already in place with Microsoft. And then the RFQ came out. Google protested, but the protest was dismissed, with the claim that Google was 'not an interested party.'"

Comments

Smart Move?

[alphatel]

It's one of those bureaucratic loopholes. Without the GSA schedule and number, you can be dismissed from any offering regardless of how much time you put in. Did they really not have one? Almost seems like a bad oversight.

Honestly though, even if they did can they really think that suing the gov't over some minor app is going to win tons of dollars and contracts? Every spec can be written in the future in such a way to exclude a companies abilities ad infinitum.

Re:Smart Move?

[Mongoose Disciple]

No kidding. If your goal is to pick Office over Google Docs, you can list about a thousand things Office does that GD doesn't.

Probably an easy 90% of those are features the government doesn't even care about, but certainly they can still demand them.

Reading the links, it really seems like the person at Google in charge of this didn't have a lot of experience with the realities of government contract bidding.

Re:Smart Move?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Be that as it may, should that be what we settle for? A government with no openness and ties to specific corporate vendors forever?

I don't particularly like Google as a company. I think they are kind of slimy and trade on their geek cred way too much, but I don't want them excluded from competition for government contracts.

Re:Smart Move?

[Pojut]

Government contract work is INSANE. One of my wife's relatives works in the field (writing up contracts between the US government and other companies), and based on the little I've talked to him about it, it sounds crazy complicated. I'd rather learn about the tax code instead of government contracts.

Re:Smart Move?

[jlechem]

Verbal contracts are all well and good but unless they have a DUNS and register with the CCR, and use those to get on the schedule the DoD can pretty much give them the finger and they have no recourse. Sounds like someone at Google didn't do their homework on getting DoD jobs.

Re:Smart Move?

[WrongSizeGlass]

It's one of those bureaucratic loopholes. Without the GSA schedule and number, you can be dismissed from any offering regardless of how much time you put in. Did they really not have one? Almost seems like a bad oversight.

If they had been using their "magic wifi gathering devices" they surely could have picked one up somewhere.

Re:Smart Move?

[nschubach]

you can list about a thousand things Office does that GD doesn't.

They did list things:

The DOI justified limiting its offerings to Microsoft, by saying that Microsoft had two things that other solution providers did not: unified/consolidated email and "enhanced security."

And Google responded to those:

Google disputes this (not surprisingly) and notes various problems with Microsoft solutions -- including well reported downtime issues.

Re:Smart Move?

[bytestorm]

A plaintiff company Onix apparently does have a GSA Schedule 70 and provides solutions based on google docs. Since they (google) are not providing the service directly, however, they shouldn't need one. According to the complaint, the companies have been courting this since june 2009, so there was plenty of time to get one if they needed it. The deal is that when the RFQ went out, it was specifically worded such that google docs were not a usable cloud platform, even though google docs is FISMA certified, which was the DOI's primary complaint to them in the first place (or so they claim in the filing).

Re:Smart Move?

[h4rr4r]

unified/consolidated email
Lots of ways to do that

enhanced security."
This clearly indicates bribery, no one hears "Microsoft" and thinks enhanced security.

Re:Smart Move?

[Zocalo]

No kidding. I'm currently working on part of the delivery of a $1b+ tender where a dimension is specified to not exceed a given length to an accuracy of 0.5mm. This is on a device that is over 5 meters in length. Gaming the list of potential bidders/suppliers? That would be unethical, and also illegal in many jurisdictions. Stating your requirements with a high degree of precision? Nothing wrong with that!

People who write these kinds of things are well aware of what they can and can't do or say and still have no problems in making sure that their preferred supplier wins the contract without breaching the letter of the law. The spirit of the law, on the other hand, was declared dead a long time ago.

Re:Smart Move?

[h00manist]

They do have to legally outwit millions of "businesspeople" who are just constantly scheming on how to get a ton of contracts with no saleswork, and delivering as little product and labor as possible. Patriotism and ideology and help-your-country-and-community usually goes out the window fast, when people are talking about work, bills, responsibilities, profits, money, etc.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Every spec can be written in the future in such a way to exclude a companies abilities ad infinitum."

And a great way to get on that shit list is to sue the Federal government.

Re:Smart Move?

[Svartalf]

Got it in one. The explicit requiring of Microsoft's products pretty much goes beyond the typical stretching of the rules and stacking of the deck- in a way, I'm pretty sure of, they're not supposed to do in the first place.

Re:Smart Move?

[Trent Hawkins]

On another note, couldn't the government just ask for a quote and then toss it in the paper shredder?

Re:Smart Move?

[clone53421]

No. It’s the government. The RFQ and bids all have to be made open to whomever wants to see them.

Re:Smart Move?

[Svartalf]

There's also a requirement to have a PRODUCT that could be put into the Schedule to begin with. I'm pretty sure they've got a DUNS number at the least (Most major corps typically have one.) and the rest is easy.

Don't seize on what the GSA did for a reason for refusal here. I'm strongly suspecting that they were finding out what they needed to do to possibly get the business before they went and did the rest- because they'd have had to.

No, there's an issue there. It's called an EXPLICITLY CLOSED contract when they're obligated by law to provide OPEN bids for things. Claims of "enhanced security" and "integrated mail, etc." is bunk. There's a handful of actual solutions that meet all those criteria, actually, and Google was one of the prospective providers. I don't know where the lawsuit will go, but there IS a serious problem with the DOI deal there.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is the other side of the coin: Writing requirements that can't be weaseled through is really, really hard. Sometimes an expert can clearly tell beforehand that one of the bidders is a great match for the needs and should win the bid if the price is in the right ball park. However, a small oversight in writing the requirements can mean that they technically shouldn't get chosen...

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case "enhanced security" probably is government speak for "on premises servers that can fail and have no backups when subpoenas come in" and "we don't want our data in someone else's data center" more than the inherent security of the desktop client. It may also have to do with single sign on and not maintaining one Smart Card and PIN to logon to your computer system and a separate, ID and password (not two factor) to access your mail. Both of these things may well be requirements for them. I know they are both requirements for us (at work) and we aren't even a government agency.

Re:Smart Move?

[im_thatoneguy]

No real sympathy to the contractors. They're all the kings of "letter of the law" vs "spirit of the law" in all of their dealings. It's just Karma coming back to screw them as well.

Re:Smart Move?

[Trent Hawkins]

still, no reason why they couldn't make it and just ignore it. If they didn't make a fuss, no one would have noticed anything about it.

Also, if the US government was anything like the Canadian they could have always claimed that Google's solution was incompatible with their 486 dx266 powered servers.

Re:Smart Move?

[bleckywelcky]

Um, what if you need your part to be precisely 5 meters +/- 0.0005 m?

Re:Smart Move?

[sumdumass]

Perhaps their goal isn't as much to get tons of money for their minor app, but to make sure that they can be able to bid on larger contracts where the staked might be higher. If the government limited the solution to a Microsoft only solution, then it does seem to favor Microsoft heavily. They will need a good argument to why only Microsoft can be selected. And if they do not have a good argument, then any third party can start to compete for the contract.

Basically, I see this lawsuit more as a way to get their foot in the door then to make money from this one lost sale.

Re:Smart Move?

[metamatic]

No kidding. If your goal is to pick Office over Google Docs, you can list about a thousand things Office does that GD doesn't.

This wasn't about office applications, it was a messaging solutions deal. Can you find 1,000 things that Exchange does that Google Gmail, Calendar and Docs don't do? [Yeah, I know, crash if you have more than 1,000 users...]

Re:Smart Move?

[robot256]

There are usually far better ways to design something than to require 0.01% accuracy of the machinist. Ordinary machining techniques are good down to 0.1%, beyond that difficulty and cost rises exponentially. Any commercial customer would know it was worth their time to redesign the assembly to need less accuracy, or fire the idiot who didn't change the default tolerances on the drawing and got a quote 100x more expensive than it should have been.

Re:Smart Move?

[metamatic]

This clearly indicates bribery, no one hears "Microsoft" and thinks enhanced security.

Does Google's professional mail solution support S/MIME? Gmail doesn't, and it's a gaping hole in their messaging offering when compared to pretty much any popular messaging application on the market.

Re:Smart Move?

[Hylandr]

Having worked in this industry myself I can vouch not only for the insanity and complexity, but the brutality savage political combat that ensues just to maintain existing 'stovepipes'.

It's pathetic to behold, and a wonder we still have a nation at all.

- Dan.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Docs is horrendous. Vanilla plain features, horrible display and formatting, poorly thought out UI... Google needs to invest some time and innovation into Google Docs, it really makes them look bad.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? Where Google's approach to security, by their own CEO every time they are busted for breaching it, is usually "well seriously, if you weren't doing anything wrong you wouldn't need it?" Google's IM client is a joke and their email is not up to enterprise features. Exchange and Lync are lightyears beyond what Google is doing. Google really wants to be Enterprise Ready, but in reality they have a whole bunch of projects that are ran in an amature way with literally no real support infrastructure. Who ships a phone and gives the customers an email address for customer service? Really.

Re:Smart Move?

[camperslo]

It's pathetic to behold, and a wonder we still have a nation at all.

Actually a major portion of the Earth was destroyed some time ago and you've all been plugged into simulations coming from the international space station and the moon. You're not actually awake, but are plugged into an interface. Due to a writers' strike and shortages of tantalum and thorium, you may vanish from the simulation at any time. My condolences.

Re:Smart Move?

[erroneus]

You would be correct in that assumption. The very existence of AMD in its present *Intel Competitor* form was born of the requirement of the government to be able to select among at least two providers. At the moment, there isn't a *Windows competitor" in the sense that it is compatible... there was, but OS/2 was killed through underhanded bundling deals and the like.

It is beyond time that the government is called to task on the way it follows its own rules.

Re:Smart Move?

[Frequency Domain]

Verbal contracts are all well and good...

Verbal contracts aren't worth the paper they're written on.

Re:Smart Move?

[SplashMyBandit]

If you re-read you'll notice this was not the DoD but DOI.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it was a typo and they meant unenhanced security :)

Re:Smart Move?

[sloth jr]

It's losing the battle to fight the war. Realistically, it's going to be virtually impossible for GoogleApps to get a play in the current DoI RFQ.

What they can do is create such a stink and furor that the DoI becomes a cautionary tale on how not to create future closed bids.

Re:Smart Move?

[Bigjeff5]

Welcome to the government, my friend.

Re:Smart Move?

[the_womble]

I don't particularly like Google as a company.

Compared to Microsoft!

Re:Smart Move?

[Znork]

There are usually far better ways to design something than to require 0.01% accuracy of the machinist.

I wonder if the contract specified the temperature on delivery; the thermal expansion of most materials would vary beyond that required accuracy within normal room temperature variations.

Re:Smart Move?

[sumdumass]

Yep, that's probably why Google listed a bunch of communications between them and the DOI in their complaint.

The evidence building up to a verbal contract can be evidence or claims of the contract in and of itself. Don't get too hung up on the term verbal as even they are documents in some ways.

Re:Smart Move?

[ScrewMaster]

Google Docs is horrendous. Vanilla plain features, horrible display and formatting, poorly thought out UI... Google needs to invest some time and innovation into Google Docs, it really makes them look bad.

That's as may be ... but here's the question: is it close enough for government work?

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

"enhanced security"
This clearly indicates bribery, no one hears "Microsoft" and thinks enhanced security.

It's a bit funny that part of "enhanced security" to the DOI means FISMA certification, which Google's cloud collabortaion package does have but Microsoft's does not; the SOW even specified that since FISMA-compliance is mandatory but Microsoft's cloud is not yet certified, that part of the work under the contract would be obtaining FISMA certification for Microsoft's cloud solution.

Re:Smart Move?

[imlepid]

This clearly indicates bribery, no one hears "Microsoft" and thinks enhanced security.

Does Google's professional mail solution support S/MIME? Gmail doesn't, and it's a gaping hole in their messaging offering when compared to pretty much any popular messaging application on the market.

Disclaimer: I work for USGS/DOI.

Yes, that amongst other things. One big aspect of any federal government purchase is the requirement of encryption, and not just any encryption, but FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption systems. As far as I know, Gmail does not support that, while Exchange does.

What's more, about 1/2 the DOI has an MS Exchange-based email system, while the other have (at least the few bureaus that I know of) use a Lotus Notes-based system. So, the idea with this transition is to merge into one solution with the assumption it will be cheaper. (Will it be cheaper? Who knows...)

From what I understand, the Networx transition in DOI underwent a similar problem where the contract was awarded to the incumbent (Verizon) and this resulted in protests.

Overall I like FIPS 140-2 because it means I'm less likely to be sold a snake-oil security product, although it drives up costs inordinately. One example: I just purchased 5 2GB USB drives, for $250. The FIPS compliant price $50/unit where an off-the-shelf USB drive costs ~$8.

All things told, I would love to have a Gmail solution, but until they get FIPS 140-2 compliance, I'm stuck with MS Exchange...sad though it may be.

Re:Smart Move?

[sumdumass]

The complaint said Google Apps not Google Docs. Are they one in the same or should I read the rest of the complaint? I pretty much stopped after about half way through. I seriously do not know if they are difference or if one is a rename of the other or what.

Re:Smart Move?

[knarf]

where a dimension is specified to not exceed a given length to an accuracy of 0.5mm. This is on a device that is over 5 meters in length.

I hope they also state a temperature with these specifications as this level of accuracy is easily fouled up by thermal expansion...

Re:Smart Move?

[trout007]

Usually the Measurement equipment is calibrated at 20C and that is what a standard note on the drawing would call out. If it was a steel part the CTE is around 18 micrometer per (meter C). So for a 5 m part for every degree C you would have .09 mm change in length. I am a mechanical engineer and sometimes you forget to check the tolerance on every dimension and the CAD standard applies. The problem with working for the government is the bid is based on the RFQ. In the real world the shop can call the engineer and ask if they really needed it that tight and usually it was something that was missed.

Re:Smart Move?

[Goody]

Google Docs is horrendous. Vanilla plain features, horrible display and formatting, poorly thought out UI... Google needs to invest some time and innovation into Google Docs, it really makes them look bad.

Mod parent up, exponentially. I'm so sick of hearing on Slashdot how great Google Apps/Docs and Gmail is. I can only imagine that the people who think Google Apps is a suitable office suite for business use must have been using vi or notepad.exe all their lives. Google Apps is great for a goofy little spreadsheet with minimal functionality or writing a letter to Aunt Sally, but it's incredibly painful to run a real business on it. Gmail is fine for personal email, but it doesn't come close to Exchange and Outlook (warts and all) with its integrated scheduling and groupware functionality. Believe me, I'd love for Google Apps to overtake Microsoft. The problem is Google needs to think like Microsoft and how real businesses are run, not Google where you get one day a week to goof off and organizing data is throwing it all in one big bucket and letting search sort it all out.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell someone to program me some more damn money then.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

ARRRRGH!! Nobody wants to hear the details...we know all we need to from the title and excerpt.

Re:Smart Move?

[kenh]

This RFQ is how the Gov't establishes pricing for a planned purchase, it is not an ITB (invitation to bid) which would be the purchase step, nor is it an RFP where the Gov't puts out a concept and asks respondents to devise and price a solution - Google apparently thinks an RFQ is an RFP, and that an RFP is the same thing as an ITB:

See: http://www.onvia.com/b2g-resources/article/responding-to-an-ifb-rfp-rfq-do-you-know-the-difference

Re:Smart Move?

[AHuxley]

http://cryptome.org/deepwater/deepwater.htm
The US gov has often learned about about contracts via terms like 'eight leaking cutters". They seem to like to get their needs down on paper.
This looks like a no bid contract, but inside the US over software.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google should pay their taxes before they sue the government probably :)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes.html

Re:Smart Move?

[HermMunster]

What I read are typical excuses given when someone's trying to cover up their practices after having been caught.

Re:Smart Move?

[HermMunster]

Google isn't just bitching about the fact that Google Doc's isn't considered. They are bitching about the fact that the government ONLY considers Microsoft products.

Re:Smart Move?

[bmo]

Actual machinist/toolmaker here:

"Ordinary machining techniques are good down to 0.1%"

*a dark cloud appears above my head* I'll try to bite my lip and be civil about this. .1% for a 25.4mm part is .0254mm, (1 inch, and .001 inch respectively, for SAE). Charles Babbage was able to meet that tolerance with the tools of the time - the builders of the modern Difference Engine empirically found they could indeed do so. When the Difference Engine was built using his old plans, they decided to take on the argument that Babbage couldn't possibly build his Difference Engine due to lack of technology. They found that argument to be bogus. Depending on what you're doing, that kind of tolerance these days may as well be plus or minus a mile, especially if you're sending something to be ground. With superfinishing (Supfina Inc., North Kingstown RI (my childhood hometown)) you're looking at microns or smaller.

Affordable glass scales and ballscrew retrofits have even made manual machining a lot more accurate. Drill 2 holes 500mm apart plus or minus .02 mm? All I've got is a rebuilt Bridgeport with glass scales? I've got AC that doesn't blow directly on the machine tool and shrink one side of it? NO PROBLEM.

Am I insulted? Yeah, a little bit. Bring coffee into the shop next time. Thanks.

--
BMO

l Postscript: Yesterday's thread about math made me angry, but since it was mobbed I didn't bother contributing. But I have to say this, yeah sure a lot of people go through their lives with just arithmetic, percentages, and a rough idea of area and volume. But if you want to build anything *interesting,* you'd better have paid attention to your geometry, trig, and calc teachers. Yeah, sure, computers do a lot of the bull-work calculation, but it's a good idea to have a good idea.

Re:Smart Move?

[admiralex]

Loopholes are not really the issue here.

I work in the Federal Government doing IT, and you're dealing with a workforce that is neither nimble nor flexible and in a lot of cases is a decade and a half behind the rest of the world technologically. It's easy to say from a bird's eye perspective let's just rip all the Microsoft stuff out and throw in some tech from some other vendor, but think about what that would mean to the civil servants, most of whom are in their 50s or 60s and don't particularly like computers in the first place. Indeed, I'm a Mac guy working next to a group of people who are supporting a mainframe that's just within the past year been decommissioned in favor of a move to a Windows-based software delivery platform that until a few months ago was running on Windows 2000 server. Who's going to teach them how to use the new stuff? What happens when it's upgraded? And web applications, as we all know, are upgraded at warp 8. Who's going to teach them how to use it securely and effectively? How is it going to integrate into existing workflows? Where are you going to find contractors with the appropriate certifications, clearances, and .gov experience to support it?

The government runs on Microsoft and MS is entrenched in the data center. Windows is JUST NOW displacing mainframes, and the Mac is nibbling at the edges of that. Web-based apps (especially hosted somewhere other than a secure room in the heart of one of the giant buildings in downtown DC) are out of the question for a variety of reasons, and that is not going to change before we've moved on to whatever comes after the current web apps craze.

Google has a point, but the deck is decidedly stacked against them. The fairness argument they're trying to make will be trumped by practicality. The government is not going to set up a hodgepodge of different platforms all doing the same thing in different, sometimes incompatible ways just because it's not "fair" for competing technology to be excluded from the bidding process.

Re:Smart Move?

[dondelelcaro]

Gmail doesn't [support S/MIME], and it's a gaping hole in their messaging offering when compared to pretty much any popular messaging application on the market.

There are various client-side plugins which support S/MIME for Gmail (which is actually the right place to do it). See Gmail S/MIME and other similar plugins.

Re:Smart Move?

[drougie]

ARRRRGH!! Nobody wants to hear the details...we know all we need to from the title and excerpt.

you read the excerpts?

Re:Smart Move?

[HungryHobo]

Some snake oil still gets through....
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/fips_140-2_leve.html

I'm curious about the USB drives.
Are there no software encryption systems which are FIPS compliant?
or is this a case of requiring hardware which forces the user to encrypt properly rather than merely allowing them to encrypt properly.

Re:Smart Move?

[Zak3056]

Google disputes this (not surprisingly) and notes various problems with Microsoft solutions -- including well reported downtime issues.

What "well reported downtime issues?"

My Exchange boxes haven't had any significant downtime (outside of scheduled maintenance windows) in the last six years--and that includes the time we migrated all the users into a new forest! Granted, this started as a very small domain of only ~100 users, but for the last 18 months (as a result of the above mentioned forest move) we've been serving about six hundred at nine sites in six countries with no outages.

I think people are still thinking about the days of Exchange 5.5 as if that were today. Today's Exchange is stable and scalable.

Re:Smart Move?

[macshit]

Hmm, YMMV I guess, but I love google docs, especially the most recent versions, which seem to have really improved over the originals (I guess they integrated a bunch of stuff from google wave?).

They're really nice for typical light everyday editing use and exchanging documents, where bloated messes like MS word or openoffice are just overkill (and inconvenient).

The realtime collaborative editing is also a killer feature for my use -- I regularly edit documents together with friends halfway around the world (while we discuss the changes over the phone).

The google docs drawing program is also really nice these days, and is really the first "collaborative web drawing editor" I've tried that is actually good enough to use on a regular basis (there are tons of them out there, but except for the one in google docs, they all seem to suck).

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

I used to work for a company that made electron microscopes (a fairly rarefied market to begin with). Our company patented a feature having to do with pre-evacuating the sample exchange airlock. As a result, of course, no other company could build a microscope that had that particular feature. Our sales reps used to coach customers who wanted our microscopes to write their purchase reqs in such a way as to list that feature as one of several non-negotiable "must have" items...and that knocked every other company out of the running cold.

Writing purchase requests to exclude a specific company (or to limit the field to a single company) is relatively easy. Fair? Nope. But it happens allllllllllll the time.

Re:Smart Move?

[fishbowl]

Either way, if the choices are yours to make, do you choose government work?

Re:Smart Move?

[fishbowl]

I beg your pardon, but neither Google Docs nor Microsoft Word is a suitable alternative to vi, and certainly not to VIM.
You speak of "vi and notepad.exe" as if they are equivalent. That's just plain insulting and ridiculous.

Re:Smart Move?

[fishbowl]

"People who write these kinds of things are well aware of what they can and can't do or say and still have no problems in making sure that their preferred supplier wins the contract without breaching the letter of the law. "

The problem they run into is when it becomes part of a question in a civil suit, where the dreaded test of "reasonable" comes into play.

It matters less that your words are strictly legal, and matters much, much more what a "reasonable person" understands. And if some kind of foul play is in question, your example could certainly be brought up by a plaintiff in a way that the defendant would be forced to explain to a jury and to a judge about how it's reasonable and not purposely exclusive, or whatever the problem is supposed to be.

Re:Smart Move?

[Eskarel]

Yes actually, Microsoft are actually one of the good guys these days.

True, a lot of that has to do with other companies becoming a lot more evil, but some of it has to do with them becoming more good?

Seriously, take a step back, and think about it. Which is worse, anti-competitive behavior or driving around capturing everyone's network traffic, logging their every move, and generally being batshit crazy? Steve Balmer may be a knob, but have you been listening to Eric Schmidt lately? Oracle aren't even in the running for having a soul they were always worse than Microsoft, Lord Steve has the god complex from hell, Sun is gone, and Novell have been treating their customers like dirt for decades.

I'm not saying Microsoft are angels or anything, but as far as big software companies go, the only one I can think of that isn't more evil than Microsoft these days is IBM, and they're not all that much less evil.

Re:Smart Move?

[Fnord666]

All things told, I would love to have a Gmail solution, but until they get FIPS 140-2 compliance, I'm stuck with MS Exchange...sad though it may be.

If you are waiting for gmail to support any sort of encryption, don't hold your breath. Google has a very vested interest in being able to scan and catalog every single piece of mail that flows through their system. Never forget why gmail was created. Google doesn't do it to be a good netizen. In the end it's all about money, and having email traffic that they cannot read doesn't make them any.

Re:Smart Move?

[turbidostato]

"If your goal is to pick Office over Google Docs, you can list about a thousand things Office does that GD doesn't."

"a Request For Quotation for the *messaging* needs of the Department of the Interior"
(emphasis mine)

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is on a device that is over 5 meters in length."

A billion for how many units of these? You leave that out. Also, something under the size of a two-story building isn't a big deal. A freaking billion is a lot of money it seems for whatever is being built, but I don't know if this is for the whole finished piece or pieces and what else is involved. What you say sounds impressive, sort of, but the lack of details may be on purpose..

But dimensionally, the fact that this is considered impressive or difficult is a showing how badly US tech has fallen.

Half a millimeter today is trivial given the numerous and affordable fabrication and metrology products out today. Between the servos, advanced microstepping, measuring feedback, interferometers, and other measurement tools, piezos, and a host of other commercially available equipment out there, I don't see what the big deal is. The 5m actually makes this issue easier to deal with. At least it's not something miniature that's been EDM'd and you need a damn microscope to find.

I'd bet some fine cars would meet your technical criteria well, and they're not built on billion dollar budgets per model.

Re:Smart Move?

[Artifakt]

You won't need the thorium if you just change line 128878443119 to read "If Bioage>25 assign Bioage=25"

Don't forget, Bioage has already been cast as a float. Don't change that. Integer Bioages would cause problems, particularly for Bioage less than 0.5 years.

Please feel free to set my Minbankacct variable to, say, 1.45 E10 while you're in there.

Re:Smart Move?

[Kumiorava]

The issue that Google has wasn't about any particular feature that is required. I'm pretty sure that FIPS 140-2 (if it was a requirement) would be implemented for any Google product if at all possible. Main issue is the requirement to use Microsoft BPOS-Federal product as the basis of the service.

Re:Smart Move?

[jmottram08]

He isn't waiting for it, no one is, they are just buying/using a product that actually does what they need.

Re:Smart Move?

[Sparr0]

For a $10B contract, it is quite likely Google would simply implement any missing features that are listed in the requirements. A win for everyone.

Re:Smart Move?

[robot256]

My apologies, sir. I am myself an amateur machinist--with only one semester of formal training but many hours of practice--and I realize citing that percentage was not the right way to estimate what would be "trivial" to meet. I in no way meant to downplay the fact that work can be incredibly precise in many cases with very little effort. Hardly a day goes by without me admiring the work machinists do for the lab I work in.

I was just having difficulty wrapping my head around how to finish a 5-meter-long dimension to half a millimeter. Even finding a reference length to compare against would be difficult. I wonder if they had to resort to some sort of optical measurement.

Re:Smart Move?

[Nursie]

There are levels within FIPS 140-2. Software can reach a certain level, beyond that it has to be hardware, IIRC.

FIPS 140-2 is concerned with the security of algorithms used on data leaving and entering a secure system, so a software component simply makes the PC into the device that the FIPS validation applies to. Or that was my reading anyway.

IIRC there is a specific version of openssl that got FIPS 140-2 validation/certification a little while back.

Oh, here it is, looks like a sub-project within openssl, or a subset or some-such.

Re:Smart Move?

[janeuner]

The only thing that FIPS 140-2 implies is that someone in marketing figured out that by using the correct algorithms, they can sell crap products to the government. Congratulations - you just screwed the public for $210 for a flash drive that is no more secure than commercial grade sticks and a copy of TrueCrypt (which uses FIPS 140-2 compliant algorithms, no less)

But hey, why should you care? Enjoy your job security.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another example of why patents are bad.

Not like the other companies wouldn't have thought of that idea eventually if they had to.

Re:Smart Move?

[Mongoose Disciple]

I don't think you understand how government contracts work. If they don't want to pick you (or they want to pick someone who isn't you), they'll just move the goalposts until you give up.

Re:Smart Move?

[TropicalCoder]

Yes actually, Microsoft are actually one of the good guys these days.

What kind of cool aid have you been drinking? Note to Slashdot staff - this kind of comment is exactly why I haven't posted on Slashdot for the past year. There has been no change in Microsoft's behaviour whatsoever. They are the same old evil company they always were, only now, they have shills posting this kind of nauseating drivel on Slashdot every day, and that is why I don't post here any more. Slashdot has been bought out by the Vole. Now watch my karma evaporate in 1, 2, 3...

Re:Smart Move?

[imlepid]

The only thing that FIPS 140-2 implies is that someone in marketing figured out that by using the correct algorithms, they can sell crap products to the government. Congratulations - you just screwed the public for $210 for a flash drive that is no more secure than commercial grade sticks and a copy of TrueCrypt (which uses FIPS 140-2 compliant algorithms, no less)

Disclaimer: I work for USGS/DOI.

Not really true. (Not true at all, actually...) FIPS 140-2 requires much more than just certain algorithms. Much of the requirements relates to making sure keys are properly handled, that RNGs function as desired, and that the device is tamper-resistant and tamper-evident.

Further, regulations stipulate that sensitive, but unclassified (continuity of operations and contingency plans) and personally identifiable information (PII) (social security numbers and such) data must be encrypted using a FIPS 140-2 certified encryption systems, not merely FIPS 140-2 compliant systems (as you suggest). (Becoming certified is a costly process, one which has granted firms that submit to the process a high level of economic rents.) If I could deploy systems which I felt were of an equivalent security level as FIPS 140-2 requires, I would certainly do so (spending $250 on 5 USB drives doesn't help me in any way).

Re:Smart Move?

[Sparr0]

Right, and when there are only two contenders for the contract, said moving of goalposts is illegal, which is the thing Google is suing over.

Re:Smart Move?

[davester666]

You just make a device that can count atom's, then run the device down the product to make sure it's within tolerances.

It must be this precise, because the President's table needs to be as big as possible, but still fit through one particularly tight corner at the White House.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I wish I had mod points.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to inspect parts in a very large job-shop. .5mm on a 5 meter part? Is that all? There were a lot of parts where the tolerances were much smaller than that (+.0004 -.0000 inches). Thats +.01016mm -.0000mm. Some of the longer parts were over 300 inches long (7.62 meters). Nothing cost more than 1b+. Not even all the parts they made in a year. Even if it was all made from either tungsten carbide or titanium. I agree with the parent, your tolerances might sound impressive to the great unwashed, but they aren't. We had surface finishes (we used superfinishing as well) in the 1-2 microinch range (average RMS surface roughness of 0.0000001-0.0000002 inches) which looks shiny like a mirror and is important for things like bearing races, and parts that require a very precise fit.

Re:Smart Move?

[MadX]

Depending on the material used, surely upon delivery - the weather would be the final measuring factor ?

A few degrees could result in shrinkage or expansion over that surface area which would exceed the specification. Well, in my mind anyway.

Re:Smart Move?

[xtracto]

You see... I am a software developer and Computer Scientist. For that reason I like a software company (and I would love to work on any of those).

However, I do not like advertising companies. I am no a marketer or whatnot. That's why I prefer MS to Google. Granted, right now MS is completely out of their way (shitty CEO) but as a company, I prefer a software company any time of the day.

Remember, MS is not here to profit *from your personal data and habits*, that other company *is*

Re:Smart Move?

[bmo]

Fortunately for everyone working in all shops and labs everywhere, STP, standard temperature and pressure, is room temperature and the sea level air pressure of a sunny day. Heat/cool the shop to 20C or 68F and you won't have any problems. A couple of degrees either way doesn't make much difference unless you get into really large pieces. And any small shop worth its salt will have an inspection room that is climate controlled to plus or minus a degree. If you do have a problem with the climate control, you can look up the temperature coefficient of the material you're using and adjust accordingly. But that's bogus. Close off a room, stick an HVAC unit on it with a good thermostat and you're good to go.

--
BMO

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, just because someone does not share your RMS-like fanatical hatred of a corporate entity does not mean that they are a paid employee of that company.

Note to Slashdot staff - this kind of comment is exactly why I have only posted anonymous trolls on Slashdot for the past year. There has been no change in anti-(MS/Apple/Linux/Google/Whatever) zealots behavior whatsoever. They are the same old annoying whining children they always were, only now, they post this kind of nauseating drivel about shills on Slashdot every day, and that is why I only troll here any more. Slashdot has been overrun by the ignorant fanboys. Now what as nothing happens to my karma in 1, 2, 3.. (btw, I guess you wanted to make that a countdown? Hard to think straight with all that rage-induced adrenaline running through your veins, I guess)

Please wait at least another year before your next comment, TropicalCoder, you shan't be missed.

Re:Smart Move?

[Bu11etmagnet]

You speak of "vi and notepad.exe" as if they are equivalent.

Of course they are, just as (car analogy ahead) a Trabant or Yugo is equivalent to Rolls-Royce or Maybach.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm.. do you realize that in order to obtain FISMA certification you are required to use certified FIPS 140-2 encryption? There are no waivers, and this is an in-stone requirement for all systems (from LOW to HIGH). Google was awarded MODERATE categorization, and that's all I need to know that all the claims about security are just smoke and mirrors.

Re:Smart Move?

[MadX]

I agree ..
The OP spoke of 5m pieces - not too sure on width, but I would think that you would need some serious space in an inspection room.
Overall, it's still quite fascinating :)

Re:Smart Move?

[vegiVamp]

So why oh why did you lot not specify FIPS 140-2 complicance, instead of requesting "Microsoft-only" ? Same effect, according to what you just posted, but at least you allow others to jump in.

The single-solution argument is bogus, too - by that logic, you could just as well switch to Lotus only. That kind of reasoning is what gets you stuck with sucky tech and no hope for improvement.

Provide *accurate* requirements, and see what comes out. With any luck, the winner will be good enough that the other departments will also want issue a new bid. But that logic obviously goes contrary to the bribery and political donation interests, doesn't it ?

Re:Smart Move?

[bmo]

I was just having difficulty wrapping my head around how to finish a 5-meter-long dimension to half a millimeter. Even finding a reference length to compare against would be difficult. I was just having difficulty wrapping my head around how to finish a 5-meter-long dimension to half a millimeter.

It's not difficult if you have the right measuring equipment. Nikon has a laser measurer that does very large volumes (aircraft sized) and is pretty darn accurate over large distances. It's expensive, but if the guys in the shop measure stuff like this on a regular basis, it's a big time saver.

In the old days, there were other methods that weren't nearly as convenient for such large distances.

You should ask them what they did.

Hexagon AB makes CMMs you can drive cars into.

--
BMO

Re:Smart Move?

[uninformedLuddite]

It must be this precise, because the President's table needs to be as big as possible, but still fit through one particularly tight corner at the White House.

Not when your this far up the food chain. The President gets the table size he wants and if the front of the White House has to be removed to fit it in then we might as well remodel/rebuild the whole bloody thing because that is what economic stimulus is all about.

Re:Smart Move?

[greap]

Shhhh, if you are not careful the google rape vans will overhear you.

Re:Smart Move?

[Hognoxious]

And if my goal was to choose Mongoose Disciple over you, I could list thousands of things he can do that you can't.

Recognizing analogies, for one...

Re:Smart Move?

[AK Marc]

One big aspect of any federal government purchase is the requirement of encryption, and not just any encryption, but FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption systems. As far as I know, Gmail does not support that, while Exchange does.

It's not the job of the RFP to specify which products they think meet the standards they need and assert only those will be accepted. It's the job of the RFP to specify which standards need to be met and leave it to the bids to satisfy that. Anything else looks like illegal bid fixing.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, too was pissed off about the "you don't need math" article. Just about every DIY project from building my scuba diving torch, to working out the cost of the carpet required to cover my sun room has required at least a working knowledge of a bit more than basic arithmetic. Try investing any money without a working knowledge of sequences and you're fair game to every fast talking scheme peddler.

Math is the single most important skill learned in school. Fuck anyone who tries to convince kids they don't need it.

Re:Smart Move?

[kantos]

A client side plugin does not satisfy FIPS as it has to be an integrated portion of the system, this is because the requirement also includes the ability for network administrators to enforce S/MIME on all messages on the network, which cannot be enforced using a client side plugin. Sadly this sort of requirement is why most of the US government still uses IE as well.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

And (according to a small-town judge I talked with) there are cases where it is worse. Like, say, specifying the street address of the manufacturer, but not the name of the company.

Re:Smart Move?

[arth1]

Indeed. A 1/2 mm might be very significant for the application. What if this was part of an elevator system, for example?
I'd be more worried if they'd let parts of 5 m deviate with 0.1% -- that'd be half a centimeter's deviation!

I see it as more of a problem that contractors go for the cheapest solution that meets the specifications, and not the best. Because reputation and formerly well/badly done jobs doesn't count for anything -- the government have been forced to choose the cheapest solution that meets the specs by ruthless politicans and the voters who support them. Which is why, to guarantee a minimum standard, the government has to write ridiculously detailed specs.

To me, it would make more sense if there was a point system that would be applied on top of the mere price consideration, to reward consistently high quality and punish consistently poor quality.

Have a government ombudsman (in the original sense of the word) inspect all projects after they're finished, and give out positive and negative points to each company depending on the quality of the work, and the same amount of + and - points being handed out each year (to avoid score inflation).
Doing exactly what the specs say = 0, doing worse and patching it up gives - points, doing higher quality work than required gives + points. Then factor in those points when a company makes a bid, by adjusting the price by a percentage.
A company making a bid at 90 million but has 10 malus points would then not win over a company making a bid at 100 million but with 5 bonus point. And the public will probably be far better off for it, than spending those 10 million on speccing a waterproof RFQ and repairs afterwards.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, take a step back, and think about it. Which is worse, anti-competitive behavior or driving around capturing everyone's network traffic, logging their every move, and generally being batshit crazy?

Yeah, do it yourself, will you? Think about it: they drive around capturing everyone's network traffic, logging emails and stuff, because, well... they couldn't access the gmail accounts?

People who see malice in google's wifi capturing action are delusional.

Re:Smart Move?

[Tim C]

Some snake oil still gets through

Well he did say "less likely to be", not "guaranteed not to be".

Re:Smart Move?

[gl4ss]

it's totally understandable for them to demand a solution that is not cloud dependent, for various real technical and political reasons(certified or not, and googles stuff is starting to be certified in contradicting regimes.).

Re:Smart Move?

[rgviza]

I was making case hardened test gages that had to be within .0005" when I was a green apprentice at M.S. Willett for testing drilled holes in armor plate for navy ships. The plate material was incredibly expensive (due to being cut prior to the drilling) so it had to be done right.

Yea they don't know what they are talking about. Using 50 year old mills/drills or lathes combined with a grinder or boring machine (depending on the surface you are working on) you can get that kind of tolerance. It's time consuming and exacting but it can be done if you are careful.

I also worked in a tool & die shop ;)

Re:Smart Move?

[rgviza]

adding any encryption library to a software application is one notch above trivial. I can (and have) done it in less than a day to an existing application with a few hours of trial and error. This is not a reason to exclude a product since they could just add the capability, especially if it meant a juicy government contract.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the GP meant "machining". I think he meant just ordinary fabrication techniques.

An untrained yokel in his garage can get 0.1%, and an untrained shipping clerk with a micrometer can verify that it's right. It's hardly what you'd even call machining. It's cheap.

A trained machinist is required to get much better than 0.01%, and a trained machinist is required to verify that it's right. Once you have to worry about the temperature of the part and the tools, you can't just send the first guy you see out to the shipping dock with a tape measure to make sure it's right. Nothing about the part is cheap anymore.

Going back to the original example. Suppose you want a part 5 meters long, at plus or minus 0.5cm. It can be fabricated with only moderate skill, and any stock clerk with a tape measure can do quality control. It's not even really a machining problem, at least not in the modern sense of the word.

But if you want a part that's 5 meters long, plus or minus 0.5mm, it's a much more difficult problem. That's narrower than the marks on a steel tape measure. In fact, it's about how much a 5m steel part will grow or shrink when the temperature changes by as little as 10 degrees. The skills and capital to produce that are expensive, and quality control on such a part are expensive.

Re:Smart Move?

[tehcyder]

No kidding. I'm currently working on part of the delivery of a $1b+ tender where a dimension is specified to not exceed a given length to an accuracy of 0.5mm. This is on a device that is over 5 meters in length. Gaming the list of potential bidders/suppliers? That would be unethical, and also illegal in many jurisdictions. Stating your requirements with a high degree of precision? Nothing wrong with that!

IIf another supplier can provide the requisite degree of precision and you can't, maybe they're just better engineers than you are? Maybe teh evil gubmint just want to use a high quality reliable supplier?

There are areas where reliability and precision are more important than price. I would imagine that suppliers of bits for nuclear weapons are held to higher standards than the office stationery providers.

Re:Smart Move?

[tehcyder]

You just make a device that can count atom's

What are you talking about, you can see 0.5 mm (millimetres) wih the naked eye. I've got a ruler marked in 1mm intervals on my desk, and I can divide it into smaller sections with a fine pencil or pin.

Are people misreading this as 0.5 nm (nanometres) or something?

Re:Smart Move?

[tehcyder]

working out the cost of the carpet required to cover my sun room has required at least a working knowledge of a bit more than basic arithmetic

Why? You take the longest side times the shortest side to give the maximum area then cut to fit when it arrives. I suppose maybe if you were doing a weird shaped room and you were using carpet tiles you could get more accurate, otherwise what's the point?

If you want to carpet an irregular polygonal room, you're basically going to have to buy a long strip of a large width, unless you want lots of ugly joins all over the room.

Re:Smart Move?

[Mongoose Disciple]

There aren't only contenders for this contract, though. (RTFA?)

Re:Smart Move?

[ebuck]

Relative morality is no morality at all.

Re:Smart Move?

[QuantumBeep]

Mod up. Painfully correct.

Re:Smart Move?

[Overzeetop]

I'd say that Google doesn't give away anything for free. They have the infrastructure and talent to make a sub-system - they've done it for other government entities.

When given a foothold into an organization with two million employees at $50-$150/yr for email services, I'd say they just might find that appealing - even without the ad revenue.

Re:Smart Move?

[jimktrains]

I thought the term was FIPS 140-2 verified and certified was just marketing BS.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose you had a five meter long ruler marked off with 1mm increments and a pencil with a fine 0.3mm tip.

You wouldn't have the tools to measure a 5m part to 0.01% tolerance.

Much more important, you don't have to training to know that you don't have the tools. You're so ignorant, you don't even know you're ignorant.

The 0.1% tolerance rule-of-thumb is to make sure that people who don't know anything about measurement don't request things they don't need and don't understand.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but its not all back room handshakes...here's my experience.

Out of grad school, I was recruited to work for the DOD as a contractor. Well, since it was somewhat of an academic position, they placed all the job ads on all of the "usual" websites for my discipline. They took their time interviewing candidates, reading letters of reference, inviting candidates for talks, hiring committee meetings, etc. Then, after I was hired, they proceeded to tell me about all of the paperwork that would have to be set up so my hiring was considered a bidded-on contract. So in fact, the official 30 day advertisement on the gov. jobs website didn't even appear until after they hired me! (They unsuccessfully tried to convince the bureaucrats that the job must be "sole sourced"...ie, they need *me*, not another bidder). So after being hired, I submit a bid to a numbered job description, for an amount we had discussed, that was narrowly written to make me the perfect candidate.

Why did bypass the system? Well, IMO, lots of reasons...in particular, it is a lot of work to get "set up" as a gov. contractor...who would possibly do all of that just to be *considered* for a single job? To get a person to do that, you really need to hire them first...almost no one who could apply for this job would have been a previous gov contractor.

Re:Smart Move?

[dondelelcaro]

the requirement also includes the ability for network administrators to enforce S/MIME on all messages on the network, which cannot be enforced using a client side plugin.

This can be easily handled with modifications to gmail for specific users who actually need it so that messages which are not in S/MIME containers are rejected. So while it may not be something that gmail can handle right this second, it's certainly something that can be specified in the RFQ so that Google can make the business decision to meet (or not meet) that requirement.

Re:Smart Move?

[Sparr0]

The argument put forward in the suit is that restricting the offerings to only MS products, regardless of who the middleman is, amounts to a single-source RFQ. I think this argument has merit, since no matter who wins the contract MS will get the majority of the money.

Re:Smart Move?

[Trailwalker]

Contact these people. I have woodworking tools that are this precise. My register plate and Starrett tools are used to gauge my other tools.

Re:Smart Move?

[Trailwalker]

Precision gauges are designed to work within a specific temperature range. My granite register plates are flat within .0001 between 70 and 80 degrees f. Higher or lower temperatures cause distortion. Fortunately, these are bench tools and are not moved about, much less taken outdoors.

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

One example: I just purchased 5 2GB USB drives, for $250. The FIPS compliant price $50/unit where an off-the-shelf USB drive costs ~$8.

More like you and I just forked over $250 for five 2GB flash drives. The gross waste of taxpayer money that I've seen firsthand in government departments is sickening.

Re:Smart Move?

[FrankieBaby1986]

In the end it's all about money, and having email traffic that they cannot read doesn't make them any.

Isn't this why the Government would be paying for this solution, and likely paying an annual fee for maintenance, etc.?

Re:Smart Move?

[Eskarel]

The thing about google's wifi capturing is not so much what they did, it's that they did it in the first place.

It indicates that essentially speaking there's no one in that company stopping people from doing bad things. There's no rational way that something like that should have been able to occur on the scale that it did. You can't offload a whole bunch of unexpected data without someone noticing and asking why. Anyone with half a brain would know that capturing that stuff was going to get them in the shit, and anyone with half a brain should have shut down the whole program till it got sorted once they knew. Google knew they were capturing that data, and they should have known it was the wrong thing to do. Either their sense of ethics is so off that they thought it was ok, or it was malicious, neither option is all that great. I know Slashdot is a giant google love fest, but the old google has been gone for a long time now. Read some of the things their CEO has said about privacy and tell me they're still the good guys.

Re:Smart Move?

[jackbird]

I have a DUNS and am registered in CCR, and I'm a one-man shop who's never actually had a government contract. I think Google probably has the procedural hurdles covered.

Re:Smart Move?

[Eskarel]

They've done a few things, they're a lot less anti-competitive now, product pricing is a bit less opaque and crazy. Mostly though what's happened is that everyone else is getting more and more evil.

The thing about Microsoft is that they want money, as much of it as they can get, and that's really just about it. They don't really care about anything else. They're not recording your every move, they're not trying to prevent you from doing things with your computer(at least not when they can help it), they just want cash. Greed is a kind of evil which is predictable and easy to deal with. Some of the all out crazy which Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have been throwing around lately is a lot scarier.

Re:Smart Move?

[TropicalCoder]

I do regret flaming like a troll. I post so rarely on Slashdot these days that I lost that discipline that made me stop and slow down and think a bit before I post. I do feel the same, however, but I should be able to give a more reasoned response now that I am calmed down.

What you give as your thesis, I see as simply the party line. Microsoft knows that it cannot erase or change the indelible history of its past, so they have gone off on a different tangent. That strategy is to try to say that they are no worse than anybody else, and pointing fingers at everybody around them. Then the next step, as you have taken, is to say, well gee, in comparison, Microsoft isn't so bad, then finally, turn it all around and say hey, Microsoft is really one of the good guys.

I see this repeated in comments all over the internet. It is called "establishing a meme." I am not saying you personally are a shill, but I am suggesting you have bought into this propaganda, perhaps without even realizing it. Hence my question "What cool aid are you drinking?".

Your original comment asks "Which is worse, anti-competitive behavior or driving around capturing everyone's network traffic...?" I would respond with a resounding: Anticompetitive behaviour! What Google did was inadvertent and they did nothing with the data they collected. In the end, it did no harm. Come on now, if people leave their routers unsecured, they are broadcasting their data to the world. I think every router on the market encourages the user to set up a secure connection, and people ignore that. They obviously are not too concerned about it.

Anticompetitive behaviour, however, is much more sinister, because by definition, it hurts the competitors. To this day we don't have a bustling market in Linux netbooks, and it appears we will not have Android netbooks either because of Microsoft's anticompetitive behaviour. Ever since this propaganda began to be distributed about the "new, kinder, gentler, more open Microsoft", there have been incidents from time to time that completely negated any such statements. Why do I get riled up about this? After all, it is a tough world out there, with many big multinationals playing hard ball all the time. What upsets me, however, is that Microsoft is still a monopoly. They still control some 94% of the desktop market, and that is a very frightening thought. No matter how much Microsoft and their supporters cast dispersions at Google, for me that only serves to contrast the behaviour between the two companies. Google really tries to "do no Evil" whereas Microsoft really tries to do evil. They can't help it - it is in their DNA.

Now I have gone to a lot of effort here to give a reasoned reply, because you spoke reasonably with me. However, I most likely will not discuss this further with you. I see so many comments like yours on Slashdot and on the Internet at large everyday, it is really hard for me to believe that I am really even speaking to a individual like myself, as opposed to some automated bot working out of Microsoft psy-ops bunker. Besides, nobody will likely ever see this comment anyhow, so what is the point?

Finally I would like to apologize to Slashdot staff for shooting my mouth off at them. I believe them to be a group dedicated to providing the very best forum for technical discussion on the web, and over the years have seen every evidence of their caring about the participants on their site. However, I am at loss to explain how what I refer to as the "Microsoft shills" came to dominate this site over the past couple of years, when this site had such a solid history of a place where a guy could go whenever he wanted to take a good bashing at Microsoft. I think they were pressured by Microsoft to allow their shills to operate unhindered. "Nice forum you have here - it would be a pity if someone broke it." I used to enjoy participating on this site immensely for many years, but when I see these kinds comments I get too upset. I still drop in regularly to read the FAs, but do my best to avoi

Re:Smart Move?

[Anonymous Coward]

compared to what? Office? Sharepoint? Are you joking?

Re:Smart Move?

[Danathar]

The issue is (and this is only according to what I've read) DOI was very evasive and misleading about the reasons Google was prohibited from submitting to the RFQ for consideration as the reason was "security" related.

That being said NO cloud service can be considered that is not FISMA compliant, not MS, not IBM.

I think their argument is that FISMA certification is arguably a competitive advantage they had to overcome before being available under GSA. Why should MS or IBM get a pass on FISMA certification when Google didn't?

In the end there may very well be good reasons to NOT take Google over MS, but MS still has to play by the same rules.

Re:Smart Move?

[Coren22]

And... When you are talking about a deployment of this size, it is Exchange Enterprise which includes clustering, so pretty much 0 downtime.

Interested party

[Evro]

Google's a US corporation, so isn't it by definition an "interested party" in any transaction involving the US government?

Re:Interested party

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'm pretty sure that's not what "interested party" means legally in this context. But that being said...

Wasn't there an article on /. last week to the effect that they were now an Irish or whatever non-US country it was corporation for tax purposes?

Re:Interested party

[Myopic]

Nope.

Re:Interested party

[vlm]

Google's a US corporation, so isn't it by definition an "interested party" in any transaction involving the US government?

I think the reasoning is that corporations own and control the US govt and/or have essentially been "merged". So, whom exactly is the interested party if you try to sue yourself?

Also everyone knows you pay money to politicians to get them to do what you want. Google apparently did not. So why is the govt to blame? I decided not to pay McDonalds for a hamburger. Oddly enough, I did not get a hamburger. Should I sue them? There is no interested party if there is no transaction.

Re:Interested party

[ginbot462]

Mod Parent up for most succinct analysis. Not that I know of these things or anything in the DoD field, but it's as if Contractor Bidder works directly with the Gov't Bid writer to ensure a win. Again, no direct knowledge of this happening. (Meaning... I didn't directly do it :) )

How is this any different

[Pojut]

How is this any different than granting no-bid contracts granted to companies for rebuilding infrastructure or working the oil fields in Iraq? Isn't a no-bid contract the same thing as saying they are considering a single company?

Re:How is this any different

[canajin56]

It's not at all the same. In a no-bid contract, they just award the contract to Microsoft. Here they had a bid! It's just that one of the requirements is that the bidder be Microsoft! TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

Re:How is this any different

[clone53421]

They aren’t restricting the bidding to only Microsoft... third-party contractors could bid on it as long as they were going to use Microsoft’s products.

Basically, they’re trying to avoid taking the low bid and then at the end of the contract finding out that all of the workstations are running some free flavour of Linux that isn’t supported and none of their employees know how to use. It’s reasonable from that perspective, although cutting Google out of the mix probably still wasn’t really the smartest move.

Re:How is this any different

[Eggplant62]

Which certainly isn't considering all options. A Microsoft only option leaves out a huge portion of the market that might be able to come up with a cost savings and a more secure solution using a free software infrastructure. How is it good for the economy and the U.S. as a nation sticking with a single vendor?

Re:How is this any different

[LordLimecat]

Then set as one of your bidding requirements that A) no retraining be needed (outlook interfaces with google apps....) or B) retraining be included. Let the vendor find a solution to your problems; dont simply say "there is no solution and we dont want you to get into a bidding war".

Re:How is this any different

[Anonymous Coward]

can the bid be just any amount chosen by Microsoft?

Re:How is this any different

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren’t restricting the bidding to only Microsoft... third-party contractors could bid on it as long as they were going to use Microsoft’s products.

Not quite, the RFQ explicitly requires Microsoft's "Business Cloud" services (not just any Joe running an Exchange server).

Re:How is this any different

[BradleyUffner]

They arent sticking to one vendor. ANY vendor is able to bid on this, including google. The requirement is that the solution must fully work with their existing Microsoft software. They want a Microsoft solution. Google (as the vendor) would be fully capable of offering them a solution based on Microsoft software, but they choose not to. They the government isn't making any deal with Microsoft in this case, they want to deal with any vendor that can give them a solution to their problem, which happens to involve Microsoft software.

It would be like the government collecting bids for Ford trucks. They will accept bids from anyone who can offer them Fords, including used car dealerships that are in no way connected to Ford.

Re:How is this any different

[cdrguru]

What you are missing is the contract is almost certainly not being awarded to Microsoft. Microsoft is probably not even a bidder.

There are hundreds of government suppliers that are Microsoft Gold Certified Partners that will be bidding. What Google seems to have wanted was to get into the RFQ process - the bid solicitation - so that the specifications did not describe a Microsoft solution. Similarly, it sounds like this actually specified a Microsoft solution, so Google has nowhere to go with this.

It isn't that there is only a single bidder - there will be hundreds of suppliers bidding on it. It is just that all the suppliers will be using the same basic solution with their consulting services and such added on.

Re:How is this any different

[sjames]

And a vendor with multiple felony convictions at that.

Re:How is this any different

[Bigjeff5]

No-bid contracts typically can only be issued when nobody has any idea what the particular service will cost. If it is possible to quantify a cost and therefore issue a bid, a no-bid contract is essentially not a possibility. They tend to be constantly adjustable as well, to reflect the fact that, after a while you will know how much things cost.

For example, Halliburton's no-bid contract to provide support services in Iraq. Going in, nobody had any idea what things would cost, and a contract based on bids would be absolutely ridiculous - you'd have outrageous bids as companies tried to cover their asses for every potential cost imaginable. It would be completely unrealistic and the bids would be astronomical. The only option then is to pick a contractor that is large enough to handle just about any issue that may crop up, and has a track record of doing good work for the government. That's where Halliburton comes in, as they fit the bill quite well (there are others that would have worked, but they have to pick one from the start, as no bids are possible).

The contract is then structured such that Halliburton estimates what each particular duty will cost as a baseline. Once they have the baseline, an arbitrary incentive is set up - something like whenever they beat the baseline cost by more than 10% Haliburton receives a 20% bonus. Follow that with criteria that if the baseline cost is beaten 6 out of 10 times, the baseline is re-adjusted.

Thus Haliburton is given the incentive to continually reduce costs until you get down to the optimum cost for whatever they are doing. The keys to doing this right is to make the bonus big enough that they want to hit it as much as possible, but not so big that it dwarfs the baseline cost. Basically you give them a moving target - they definitely want to hit it, but the more they hit it the harder it is to hit (and the less the government ultimately spends).

That's how no-bid contracts work from a bird's eye view. They are for special situations only, and are not used for every-day things.

What they are talking about in the article is gaming the bidding process to get your preferred supplier, and it is usually pretty hard to prove. Someone messed up on this one though, because it seems pretty blatant. All products that meet the requirements should be on the table, not just a single vendor's products. We've got something similar going on at my company - one service company bid $5 million to install a product that has significant use in the company, and another bid $15 million for an inferior product that has limited use within the company. The project manager added $10 million to the first bid for "potential unforseen issues" and then declared the second bid to be clearly superior. I mean, WTF?

Re:How is this any different

[Bigjeff5]

Exactly.

Re:How is this any different

[kenh]

RFQ is not a sign that MS won the contract, it is the way the Gov't establishes price - it is not a binding contract to buy anything, that would be an IFB (Invitation To Bid).

See:http://www.onvia.com/b2g-resources/article/responding-to-an-ifb-rfp-rfq-do-you-know-the-difference

Re:How is this any different

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are missing is the contract is almost certainly not being awarded to Microsoft. Microsoft is probably not even a bidder.

You are missing that this isn't an RFP for someone to stand-up an Exchange server, the RFP is explicitly to use Microsoft's "Enterprise Cloud" solution; yes, a Microsoft "partner" will be the middleman, but the solution is completely from Microsoft (Microsoft datacenters, Microsoft servers; pretty much everything but the paperwork and end-user interaction). (In Google's case, it's the same: a "middle-man" between the govt and Google with Google running all the tech.)

Re:How is this any different

[zippthorne]

Indeed. What kind of idiot doesn't want the vendors in a bidding war?!

Re:How is this any different

[xtracto]

No,

Retraining is oftentimes (almost always) not an option.

What they should have done is just leave the bidding open for everyone, and THEN select the one which is better for their needs (e.g., the one using the technology that aligns with theirs).

I don't know exactly how the decision takes place; but in my country, after all bids are taken "closed envelope" the person that pays (i.e. the government) gets to choose the one that is better for them (in terms of price and features).

Re:How is this any different

[ThatsNotPudding]

How is it good for the economy and the U.S. as a nation sticking with a single vendor?

It's a U.S. vendor (with huge, deep, monied pockets); that's the point.

Re:How is this any different

[clone53421]

That sounds okay in theory but in practice it would be no different from just specifying which vendor to use.

Re:How is this any different

[viralMeme]

"They aren't restricting the bidding to only Microsoft... third-party contractors could bid on it as long as they were going to use Microsoft's products"

"The new Federal offering will be sold directly by Microsoft, as well as by its Large Account Resellers and federal resellers .. BPOS is a Microsoft-hosted collection .. The Federal version is hosted on "separate, dedicated infrastructure in secured facilities," not in the existing datacenters where Microsoft currently hosts BPOS", link

Re:How is this any different

[clone53421]

Am I supposed to be surprised that Microsoft is bidding? What I said was, they didn’t restrict the bidding to only Microsoft.

Re:How is this any different

[viralMeme]

"Am I supposed to be surprised that Microsoft is bidding? What I said was, they didn't restrict the bidding to only Microsoft"

Microsoft isn't bidding, Microsoft is THE ONLY software company involved !

Re:How is this any different

[Anonymous Coward]

Retraining is actually a great way to get your idiot employees to either quit or founder until you can fire them.

I accidentally the whole point

[moniker127]

In related news- Google CEO Eric Schmidt was found boxing the deathstar late saturday night. Schmidt had apparently had one too many candy corn flavored schnapps.

Re:I accidentally the whole point

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he win?

Eheh

[SmallFurryCreature]

So basically, your approach would be to let your direct competitor AND arch enemy get away with their corruption and greed and walk all over you for fear that they might walk all over you again with their corruption and greed.

Your message: Don't fight the status quo because if you don't things will remain the same...

Really, grow a spine, it is all the rage these days.

Asking for a MS only solution in an open bid is NOT an open bid. If I make an open bid for cars as long as they are made by ford, then it is not open. And governments should NOT do this kind of job unless they want the outraged citizens to march to the capitol and... oooh Idols is on.

Re:Eheh

[rabbit994]

It's an open bid as in, anyone can offer a solution, it just must be Exchange based.

Re:Eheh

[nschubach]

To take his car analogy to the next level... it's like the government putting out a req. for cars using only Ford Engines.

Re:Eheh

[h4rr4r]

Which is not an open bid.
You can buy fords at any ford dealership, but limiting vehicle bids to fords would not be an open bid.

Re:Eheh

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

In my experience Exchange is not the solution to anything.

Re:Eheh

[rabbit994]

While you see evil conspiracy here, it's like putting out a bid requiring cars with only Ford Engines, because all your mechanics are Ford Mechanics and you don't want to hire GM Mechanics simply for one set of cars. My guess is they are primarily a Windows shop so by going with Exchange, they don't need to hire new "mechanics".

Re:Eheh

[rabbit994]

What are your other options? Lotus Notes which is worse then Exchange, Groupwise which require a Novell environment I doubt they have and Google Apps which may not work in their environment.

Re:Eheh

[h4rr4r]

Considering this is hosted mail, they have no "mechanics" for it.

Re:Eheh

[Svartalf]

Heh... Classic bad (very bad...) car analogy...must be Slashdot I'm reading...

Re:Eheh

[shutdown -p now]

That just means that you're not using enough of it. ~

Re:Eheh

[h4rr4r]

You left out a lot:
Zimbra
Zafara
OpenXchange(that one I know sucks)
Scalix
the list goes on and on.

Re:Eheh

[Jeffrey Baker]

No actually, you obviously did not read the complaint. It appears that the DOI required a solution in the form of Microsoft's own hosted Exchange solution, which is only offered by Microsoft itself.

Re:Eheh

[mdm-adph]

Google Apps may not work in their environment? So, they don't have web browsers?

Re:Eheh

[joelleo]

How was the parent's post Insightful?? He added nothing to the discussion and whitewashed the whole thing as "not the solution to anything." Seems a rather blunt and ignorant statement.

Why is it not the solution to anything? What makes it inferior to the other options out there? What other options ARE there that perform the same functions?

Insightful != Agree

Re:Eheh

[bonch]

Google is betting on its own corruption and greed canceling out Microsoft's.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

Google does many cool things, but Google Apps is not one of them. Our company used Google Apps for about 3 months, but grew sick of the lack of features compared to traditional desktop Apps. The "shared" environment that Apps provided was not worth the circa 1995 feature set.

Re:Eheh

[JasperHW]

Have you looked at migrating from exchange to google apps? You know my favorite part? Telling all my users that the way they sort mail is "wrong" (google's word, not mine) and they need to reclassify everything with labels instead of folders.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

shut the fuck up, you'll be under my moderator radar from now on..
-
watch ur back hole

Re:Eheh

[booyabazooka]

Asking for a MS only solution in an open bid is NOT an open bid. If I make an open bid for cars as long as they are made by ford, then it is not open.

I'm all in favor of adding unnecessary car analogies, but man, that one is so analogous that it adds absolutely no explanatory value.

Re:Eheh

[Crypto Gnome]

That's all well and good, fine for them to make that decision. NOT fine to claim 'this is open'. This is not "open" in any sense or the word other than "openly not open", it's "closed". You can't polish a turd and claim it's a diamond, it's a turd.

Re:Eheh

[rabbit994]

Open Bid means something in particular to government contracting. It means Open as in "Anyone can bid on it if they meet required specifications" not open as in "It's open source or open specifications"

Re:Eheh

[sumdumass]

I'm not sure why a Novell environment would be necessary at all. This was a bid for a hosted solution. This means that whoever won the bid would take care of everything necessary to make the bid work. They would only be connecting to it over the internet and using the front end applications which pretty much run on any modern system.

Re:Eheh

[jeepien]

That's all well and good, fine for them to make that decision. NOT fine to claim 'this is open'. This is not "open" in any sense or the word other than "openly not open", it's "closed". You can't polish a turd and claim it's a diamond, it's a turd.

If calling it "not open" will send you to jail, you call it open. And you polish that turd to a high gloss. If you're a purchasing agent, you can call up any manufacturer of anything and ask the salesman, "How do I specify your GizmoBorg brand dingus?" and he'll tell you exactly what to specify so that no other competitive dingus on the market will match those specs but one: the GizmoBorg. Is it legal? Well, there's a lot of people walking around free who would be behind bars it weren't.

Re:Eheh

[ScrewMaster]

In my experience Exchange is not the solution to anything.

"Outlook not so good." Man, that Magic 8 Ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next ...

Re:Eheh

[tftp]

they need to reclassify everything with labels instead of folders.

Why would you want to say that? They don't need to know how it's done. Labels look like folders and act like folders, so folders they are.

The only thing that Google mail does differently is it can show mail from multiple folders in one view. This capability can be retained, or the button "Label" can be removed altogether (Google certainly can do that at the source.) I'm sure if Google gets the contract they can spend five minutes on making their system UI-compatible with legacy systems.

Re:Eheh

[scamper_22]

Considering there are probably a whole host of documents, procedures, scripts, backup systems, contact people, custom applications... that might be tied to Exchange...
Let's not even get to the migration costs and risks.

Being hosted... doesn't mean there's nothing to do for an organization of any size.

Re:Eheh

[currently_awake]

Does ford still make engines? I thought they outsourced that.

Re:Eheh

[kenh]

You seem confused, no doubt blinded by your irrational hatred of anything to do with Microsoft...

RFQ is not a sign that MS won the contract, it is the way the Gov't establishes price - it is not a binding contract to buy anything, that would be an IFB (Invitation To Bid).

See:http://www.onvia.com/b2g-resources/article/responding-to-an-ifb-rfp-rfq-do-you-know-the-difference

Re:Eheh

[wwbbs]

Why is Lotus Notes worse then Exchange. Lotus Domino Server with all the bells and whistles is probably equally or more expensive than MS Exchange but it works and works well out of the box (as much as a Groupware platform can work out the box) for most people. Also Lotus Domino Server and Client is multi-platform and will work under linux. I've got experience in sysoping nodes in a 52 Site 8000 + User Lotus system with PKI and was quite happy with the directory features.

Re:Eheh

[JasperHW]

they need to reclassify everything with labels instead of folders.

Why would you want to say that? They don't need to know how it's done. Labels look like folders and act like folders, so folders they are.

Google's own presentation to us said otherwise. Many people use folders as a todo list, not strictly categorization, and when it's filed it needs to be gone from view. Labels screw that up. I personally don't use that technique or many of the other bizarro ways real-life users use software to organize their lives/jobs, but I'm still answerable to those same people who would flip out if I told them to learn a new way. And I'm at a liberal, forward (ITwise) company, the exact opposite of the US government.

Re:Eheh

[ls -la]

It's an open bid as in, any color you like, as long as it's black.

Re:Eheh

[tftp]

Yes, I mentioned the removal of the "Labels" button. Only the "Move" button would remain. So here is the short list of changes that a billion-dollar company like Google would have to do:

1. Remove the "Label" button, keep the "Move" button
2. Inbox, Sent Mail views should only show messages without labels
3. Hide labels in all views

Did I forget anything? As I said, these few simple changes should be enough to convert Gmail's virtual folders into "real" folders (or as real as they ever get; not like the .pst database has a file structure inside.) Absence of the "Label" button only allows you to file messages once, and if you do the "Move to Inbox" action then the internal label is removed.

With regard to how Google presented its Gmail system a few years ago, who cares. They did it that way for their reasons, but you should be free to do it your way for your own reasons. Technically there is no difference between a single label and a mail folder. GMail should be tweakable to work exactly like its main competitor.

But of course some people say, and I agree, that Google is still an immature company. They make too many stupid mistakes (no need to list them here, but this is one of them.) With their money and coding resources they could have rewritten the whole Outlook and Exchange for "the cloud". Instead they sat on their $body_part and did nearly nothing, apparently unable to see farther than their nose. MS, on the other hand, always was business-savvy, and it pays. MS's Exchange/Outlook system is huge and complex and not always stable, but it does everything. In particular, MS always paid attention to government sales; even NT 3.5x was tested, and accepted, for security requirements that allowed it to be sold to the US government.

Re:Eheh

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Kerio Connect rocks.

Re:Eheh

[DittoBox]

Great! I'll buy some Lotus Se7ens!

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

Good lord. You're mounting an argument by citing serial liar Andrew Breitbart and the right-wing Washington Examiner?

Re:Eheh

[leenks]

The best I've found so far is Kerio, followed by axigen. Both FULLY integrate with outlook (so the users that refuse to switch/use another client can continue), give a decent web app, and provide full activesync support.

Both are cheaper than Exchange and easier to backup too.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

You got that right... we just implemented Exchange 2010 and after all the requirements (AND COSTS!!!!!!!!!) it still has many issues and is crap.

Re:Eheh

[bonch]

Are there any facts in the articles that you can dispute? If not, you're playing a classic distortion tactic.

Google does, in fact, only play 2.4% corporate income tax due to tax dodging, and they did, in fact, host Obama at a Democrat fundraising event days before the FTC dismissed their privacy probe. There are multiple sources for this; the two I linked were simply at the top of the Google search results.

When Microsoft got off with a slap to the wrist from its antitrust trial verdict, it was widely regarded around here as a sign of bias from the change in administration (Clinton to Bush). Such associations between Google and the current administration, however, go strangely unacknowledged.

It's no wonder you posted anonymously.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right; anything critical of Google is obviously biased. It's just a big coincidence that Google dodges millions in taxes, has Obama over for dinner, and gets a stamp of approval from the FTC in the span of a week.

Here are left-leaning media outlets reporting the exact same things as Brietbart and the Washington Examiner:

MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39784907/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/10/21/businessinsider-googles-marissa-mayer-to-host-president-obama-for-30000-a-head-fundraiser-2010-10.DTL

Re:Eheh

[fishbowl]

I was very surprised, though, to see that once they started using it, some of the people who had been the most doubtful, became the biggest advocates of the Gmail way. It's dramatic enough that if we wanted to go back to Exchange or Outlook or Entourage, there would be blood, and the execs, not IT, would be the ones protesting the loudest.

Once you do an honest cost/benefit analysis of (paid-for, corporate) Google mail, it's not a hard sell at all. The problem, if it is one, is persuading decision makers to actually be honest and disinterested in their analysis. That's often much, much more difficult than it should be.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just dismissing the sources but not the facts in the stories. You got modded up for that? "Good lord."

Multiple news outlets reported on Google's "dutch sandwich" tax scheme, and Marissa Mayer's $30k-a-head fundraiser is public knowledge. Eric Schmidt openly backed Obama for president and campaigned for him. Put two and two together here. Google is a huge donor for Obama and the Democrats and won't be in any trouble with the U.S. government any time soon, even though everyone else in the world is investigating them.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

While they may not have mechanics, they have drivers. Do you realize all the training they have to do? Seriously, it would be negligent of them to allow their Ford trained drivers drive a Chevy, so obviously they're going to require Fords. If a Chevy dealer wants to sell them the Fords, they're more than welcome to bid.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

no but they require strong encryption, and the lack of the ability for everyone in china to read their email. ;)

Re:Eheh

[turbidostato]

"While you see evil conspiracy here, it's like putting out a bid requiring cars with only Ford Engines, because all your mechanics are Ford Mechanics and you don't want to hire GM Mechanics simply for one set of cars."

Then you express in your RFP that due to your mechanics being all Ford's, any non-Ford proposal should include the cost of retraining their mechanics or hiring new ones. What you don't do is ask for Ford-only.

Re:Eheh

[CastrTroy]

On the other hand, going with the status quo can sometimes be the better option. I know people who were working part time in the government, who had to compete for their own job. When their temporary job was moved to a permanent job, they couldn't just have the job. They had to compete against everyone else, even people they had been working with the whole time for the job they were already doing. It wasn't alright to just hire someone who was already doing the job perfectly well, and would require no training or time to get up to speed, because they were already doing the job. They had to have an open competition, so that everyone could have an equal shot at the position. So naturally they wrote up the requirements for the job in such a way that the only person who was qualified was the person who was already getting the job. This is the exact same problem. You can't just opt to use MS solution, because all your employees already know how the MS solution operates. You have to consider non-MS solutions. Nevermind that you would have to retrain your entire department.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it is... contractor unemployment. :-)

Re:Eheh

[MeatBag PussRocket]

its more like requiring that it run on Gasoline (Windows) rather than Diesel (UNIX)

Re:Eheh

[MeatBag PussRocket]

sounds like a solid case for IT depts. to keep Exchange. i'm all about smooth operation but i'm also about still having a job.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Apps may not work in their environment? So, they don't have web browsers?

I work for the federal government on a classified network, not connected to the internet. In that case, I don't think google apps would work.

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, nothing wrong with taxpayer dollars being specified to subsidize one corporation over another. It keeps the cost down. Oh wait...

Re:Eheh

[juosukai]

Disclaimer: we are just migrating from Exchange to Google Apps.

Exchange is in no way perfect, and I am happy to see get rid of it. But if you want to / need to run your own service, none of the other solutions listed here come close.

Quoting Churchill:

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Just replace Democracy with MS Exchange. /jussi

Re:Eheh

[ozmanjusri]

might be tied to Exchange.

This is important.

It's also why MICROSOFT should be excluded from government contracts.

Re:Eheh

[ryanov]

This post MIGHT have made sense, if it weren't for the fact that this very article is about Google not getting what it wants and having to sue the government to get it.

Re:Eheh

[martalli]

Of course they have web browsers. What's wrong with IE6?

Re:Eheh

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are all crap

Re:Eheh

[Zediker]

It really comes down more to knowing how to play the game. If google didnt respond to the initial RFP (request for proposal) or attend an RFI (request from industry) or not even have a schedule on the GSA, they had this coming, and no amount of suits will fix it. If they dont play by the rules everyone else has to, you dont get the contract, period. If anything this will be an eye opener. Im not saying its perfect, but its shaped the way it is because people complained in the past, so they came up with convoluted rules to enforce things. The only ones to blame for this process is the people themselves.

Why put out a request...

[omnibit]

If only one company was going to be considered?

Re:Why put out a request...

[Monkeedude1212]

It seems like they were talking to Google and Microsoft before even putting out the request, which seems weird to me (Discussing the details of a product before the request is even out).

And then Google is upset that they weren't picked, and THEN the request was put out.

This boggles my mind, I don't get it. Is this like Momento where everything is actually going backwards?

Re:Why put out a request...

[joeytmann]

There are a lot of consulting firms out there that provide MS only solutions, which is what the DOI is asking for, not that MS being the implementors of said solution.

Re:Why put out a request...

[h4rr4r]

There are lots of ford dealerships. DOI should be looking for email/office/whatever with X requirements, not an email solution from X.

Re:Why put out a request...

[joeytmann]

Have you considered that they may already have a rather large install of ActiveDirectory/Exchange and are basically just wanting to upgrade? Being that the the RFQ wasn't actually linked its kinda difficult to know what it exactly contained.

Re:Why put out a request...

[h4rr4r]

Have you considered that many other solutions integrate with that environment just fine?

Re:Why put out a request...

[hairyfeet]

List please? because I have yet to see anything that allows such tight control yet easy to manage as AD+Exchange+Sharepoint+Win desktops. Say what you want about MSFT but they DO know how to do corporate integration well. Hell I could teach my 15 year old how to run an AD domain in no time at all. Then you have to figure in the fact they most likely have all Windows admins, which means massive retraining, and that Windows MSCEs are plentiful and cheap whereas Linux gurus are rare and expensive.

So please list the companies that do the above AND can integrate and function easily with an existing MSFT network. No "half a dozen apps by different groups that kinda sorta work" but weren't really built to lock together like AD+Exchange+Sharepoint+Win desktops. MSFT may have been seriously sucking in the consumer division with Ballmer having such a hardon to play in Job's sandbox, but for corporate environments you really can't touch MSFT. Personally I'd wish they'd spend even more time on that and less trying to let Ballmer pretend to be Jobs, but I have yet to see anything lock together and by and large "just work" like MSFT corporate products.

Re:Why put out a request...

[Bigjeff5]

Of course he didn't, that's why he made the idiotic comment.

Duh. ;)

Re:Why put out a request...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this flamebait? h4rr4r is just pointing out the obvious.

Surprise Surprise

[Murdoch5]

Why would the government consider anyone else, they want to keep a monopoly active for Microsoft. The bigger Microsoft gets the bigger kick backs the government can get it's simple math.

Could they go open source, sure but that wont make them nearly as much money as going with Microsoft, after all there not looking to buy quality there just looking to buy a solution, so think Microsoft.

Isn't that illegal?

[genfail]

It defeats the whole purpose of a bidding system to state that only one company will be considered for bidding. I might be wrong here but I'm pretty sure that's illegal. Which is probably why they are suing.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[MrEricSir]

This is what happens when you have a monopoly like the Department of the Interior. I think it's about time one of us started a department to compete with them and keep them honest.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[Derekloffin]

Sadly, it probably isn't, but it certainly should be. The least they could have done is specify require tailored to a known MS product, but no, they couldn't even be bothered to do that and skipped right to the 'only company X need apply'.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I say I want a Microsoft Xbox, Target, Wal-Mart, Toys R' Us, Best Buy etc. might all be able to sell that to me even though its a Microsoft product. Ever walked in to a Microsoft store and bought a Microsoft product? No? Huh, its almost like they have a huge network of distributors and affiliates that are allowed to sell their products to other people.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[afidel]

It depends. A perfectly reasonable RFP could include things that only lead to one technology being considered. For instance I have a VMWare cluster that uses Intel 5500 and 5600 CPU's, if I needed additional capacity without impacting my existing cluster I could write and RFP that stated that Intel 5500 and above parts which work with VMWare EVC (function masking) with my existing cluster be used. This would specify that Intel CPU's be used but would allow bidding from Dell, HP, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle and their resellers. I see nothing fundamentally wrong with such an RFP, but then I work in the private sector where picking the best technology for our needs is not only legal but often mandatory.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[h4rr4r]

And how much does the price vary on an Xbox?
That's right, basically no difference at all as they are all selling the same fucking thing coming from only one company.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[h4rr4r]

That again depends on how many machines you have, it may be more cost effective to switch everything over to AMD $hypothetical_CPU. Not accepting bids that fulfill the requirements, which would be too increase the capacity of your VMware environment, would be foolish.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[clone53421]

it may be more cost effective to switch everything over to AMD $hypothetical_CPU

That’s not how governments operate, though. You can’t roll a decision like that into an unrelated contract. You have to hire an expensive consultant and pay millions of dollars to even consider switching everything over to AMD $hypothetical_CPU, and at that point it’s hardly cost-effective any more.

I say that with my tongue only halfway in cheek.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[Zocalo]

Not necessarily, it would depend on the precise wording of the ITT and who the likely bidders are. Typically for this kind of tender the respondents would be Microsoft's gold partners rather than Microsoft themselves, although it is likely that Microsoft would be very closely involved with the actual delivery on a tender of this size. Legally, asking for "an email system" in a tender is just as legitimate as asking for "a Microsoft Exchange/Outlook based email system", especially if you already have a requirement to interact with existing Microsoft mail systems. However, as I noted in another post, if the authors of the tender have a preference they will typically have no problems in tailoring their requirements to limit the field accordingly.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[afidel]

Uh, except it requires downtime to move between platforms so in most environments that would not be an acceptable solution =)

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[h4rr4r]

You don't take everything down at once, you move one member of the cluster at a time. If you are not using clustering you will have downtime, at some point. Those intel servers will not last forever.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[BradleyUffner]

It defeats the whole purpose of a bidding system to state that only one company will be considered for bidding. I might be wrong here but I'm pretty sure that's illegal. Which is probably why they are suing.

But that's not whats happening. ANY vendor can bid on this contract. Google could bid on it they had a solution that involved Microsoft Software. As far as I can tell, Microsoft hasn't even bid on this.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[Bert64]

And why would you want an xbox?
If it's to play particular games, watch videos etc, your needs may be better suited by a PS3 or Wii, or even a PC... Unless you specifically want to do something only an xbox is capable of, such as playing games exclusive to that platform there is no reason not to consider all the other options.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[JasperHW]

Right, have you worked with IT vendors/"solution providers"? Vendors always discount off the list price, but they only discount as much as they think they can get away with while still making the sale. You will get wildly different prices for the exact same product from different vendors.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[afidel]

You don't understand. With VMWare you can cluster the hosts, but for vmotion and fault tolerance to work all members of the cluster have the same cpu's or at least cpu's that can work with EVC to mask off advanced functionality so that they all appear to be the same CPU's. This will potentially get you to 6 9's reliability if your software is sufficiently robust (and currently if it can fit into a single vCPU). The guests run on this cluster and move around between the hosts and in the case of FT actually run on two hosts simultaneously. Retiring one of the Intel server's isn't a big deal because you just buy a newer Intel server that's compatible with EVC and move the guests to that new host. That was kind of my point, there are practical technology limitations that can make a single vendor solution the best option. A good example is if they are currently using Outlook with forms based routing, to switch to an alternate messaging platform might exceed the cost of the messaging platform by several orders of magnitude based on developer costs. Is that an ideal situation to be in? Of course not, but to assume that all single source contracts are inherently bad or illegal is just stupid.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[Bert64]

Does vmware not let you join other types of processors to a cluster, assuming that your virtual machines are only exposed to the common subset of processor functionality present across the cluster? I operate a KVM cluster which certainly allows this.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[Bigjeff5]

That's going away, though. When you've virtualized everything, and all the individual parts are compatible, there should not be a reason you can't mix and match CPU's, memories, HBA's, etc. It's a software limitation more than a hardware limitation (the software should be able to manage the differing available resources) Microsoft is actively working to remove this limitation from their cluster products, and I imagine VMWare is too.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[kenh]

It's an RFQ, not an RFP - there is a difference!

RFQ is fishing for prices for a solution defined by the requestor, an RFP is a solicitation for A SINGLE, specified solution, defined by the responding organization.

RFP is the equivalent to "I'm shopping for a car that can carry my family comfortably and has god gas mileage".

An RFQ is the equivalent to "I'm shopping for a red Mustang with convertible top, high-output engine, leather seats and premium sound system".

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[afidel]

Only between all Intel and all AMD, due mostly to software support issues with things like CPUID.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[poppycock]

This is modded "insightful?" :-) I suspect the original poster had tongue firmly implanted in cheek.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[vegiVamp]

True, but specifying a minimum tech model number is vastly different from specifying a specific manufacturer. You are putting out a bid for systems that must integrate with existing hardware, wich is a lot more complex than integrating with a mail platform; and I think that this is for a replacement, too, not an extension.

On the other hand, if they would have specified "Microsoft or better", everyone could offer a Linux-based solution :-)

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome to the private sector you must be new here

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[AK Marc]

A perfectly reasonable RFP could include things that only lead to one technology being considered. For instance I have a VMWare cluster that uses Intel 5500 and 5600 CPU's, if I needed additional capacity without impacting my existing cluster I could write and RFP that stated that Intel 5500 and above parts which work with VMWare EVC (function masking) with my existing cluster be used.

Legal and illegal is a matter of semantics. If you said "Must be compatible with existing Intel 5500 parts" you are fine. If you say "Must be from Intel" then you (presuming a government contract requiring open bidding) are breaking the law. Just word it a little more generally and you are fine. No one is complaining that you didn't replace your infrastructure every time you added a CPU. They are complaining that you specified one and only one vendor/manufacturer and claimed the process was an "open" bid.

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[rdnetto]

We could call them the Department of the Exterior!

Re:Isn't that illegal?

[rdnetto]

We should call it the Department of the Exterior.

Good luck litigating against the feds

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAL and have worked on government contracting/federal procurement issues. The myriad ways in which the government gets to completely call the shots are just ridiculous. From highly technical rules for bidding to ludicrous standing requirements for protesting a bidding decision, you're really at the mercy of the contracting officer. This doesn't even begin to describe the many ways they can screw you over after you win a contract. Just look up the government's use of termination for convenience clauses to get an idea of how highly the courts favor the government when it becomes a contracting party.

Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[rsborg]

Thanks to years of being "open for business"... probably not starting with, but vastly increasing during the Bush W Administration (and not being brought back under control with Obama admin), the Department of the Interior has been almost thoroughly corrupted and captured.

It's not surprising that they are the target of lawsuit... what's sad is that they aren't sued by regular citizens for abdication of their purpose in search of bribes and kickbacks from Industry.

I wish Google best of luck in turning the stone on this cockroach-infested den of iniquity.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Wyatt Earp]

They were corrupt under Reagan, Bush and Clinton too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobell_v._Kempthorne for one.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Pharmboy]

All bureaucracies are inherently corrupt, which is why you need regular change. A bureaucrat's first and primary goal is to keep their job and benefits. There is no requirement or reward to be efficient, effective, considerate or frugal. After all, it isn't their money they are spending.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[frank_adrian314159]

And before that, they were tasked primarily with exploitation (rather than a mix of exploitation and protection) of resources, so there was really no question of any sort of bribery or corruption, unless you counted your Uncle Willy giving you preferential hiring as a park ranger because you were a good party member and his nephew. If you were an industry back then, you just signed a lease at the going price (which was even more ridiculously small than today's lease prices), and you got what was on/under the land.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[h00manist]

All bureaucracies are inherently corrupt, which is why you need regular change. A bureaucrat's first and primary goal is to keep their job and benefits. There is no requirement or reward to be efficient, effective, considerate or frugal. After all, it isn't their money they are spending.

All kinds of people enjoy waste and freewheeling. Government money is the largest source. But boss, compnay, NGO and even family money gets abused all the time too. There is really only one place for decency or lack thereof. In minds are hearts. And only one way to really reduce it from there, education. Prosecution makes people think twice sometimes, but doesn't really change who they are. Legislation and lawsuits and punishment just create even more social confusion, just visit some courts and lawsuits and you will see it offerts no real decency and solutions to society.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[ProppaT]

While I don't disagree that the Dept of the Interior is definitely corrupt, I wouldn't single out this specific instance as corruption in work. In my view, it's just as likely that it's ignorance in work where the people writing the requirements really don't understand how computers work.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Bob9113]

It's not surprising that they are the target of lawsuit... what's sad is that they aren't sued by regular citizens for abdication of their purpose in search of bribes and kickbacks from Industry.

I think a big part of the problem here is the very narrow definition of "standing". The United States court system currently does not hold that being a citizen is standing in itself regarding government activities. I can't point to specific cases regarding corruption, but two good cases to look at to frame the question of standing versus the government in general are Al-Haramain and ACLU v. NSA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Haramain_Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_v._NSA

Among the court opinions:

[T]he plaintiffs do not -- and because of the State Secrets Doctrine cannot -- produce any evidence that any of their own communications have ever been intercepted by the NSA, under the TSP, or without warrants. Instead, they assert a mere belief, which they contend is reasonable and which they label a "well founded belief,"...

You can read more about that sort of circular logic in the book Catch-22. You cannot legally know if you were being surveilled, and you cannot have standing regarding warrantless surveillance without proving you were surveilled.

To me this indicates a clear failure to understand The Constitution: All United States citizens, by any rational interpretation of The Constitution, have standing in any case against the federal government. Petition for redress of grievances is a fundamental right which the federal government does not have the authority to abridge. Asserting a lack of standing, let alone a law which prohibits you from showing standing, is a blatant violation of petition for redress.

The first does not say, "Petition for redress of grievances in which you can show that you were harmed." And even if "grievance" has some implicit notion that the petitioner cannot be aggrieved if he or she was not harmed, then it falls back to the government deriving its just authority from the consent of the governed. We The People *are* harmed when the government derives authority from something which we cannot know about and cannot submit a petition for redress about.

IE: Any set of legal standards which result in an inviolable inability to show standing are harmful to all citizens, and hence establish standing for all citizens.

That is the kind of Catch-22 I can get down with.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Bert64]

It's easiest to spend money when it isn't yours...
In government, although the money is technically yours (ie you pay taxes), its not directly yours to do with as you please... And neither does it belong to your bosses. In a private company you are directly accountable to the people who do own the money so they are somewhat less inclined to waste it.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[kenh]

RFQ is not a sign that MS won the contract, it is the way the Gov't establishes price - it is not a binding contract to buy anything, that would be an IFB (Invitation To Bid).

See:http://www.onvia.com/b2g-resources/article/responding-to-an-ifb-rfp-rfq-do-you-know-the-difference

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

RFQ is not a sign that MS won the contract, it is the way the Gov't establishes price - it is not a binding contract to buy anything,

Though it is noted in the complaint that the DOI has already moved 5,000 users to Microsoft's hosting as a "pilot project".

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm feeling a bit of Venus Project/Zeitgeist Movement here, am I right?

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

here here!

My last job got overrun by bureaucrats suddenly, when the boss was freaking out about a lawsuit, he hired a bunch of people "experienced" in dealing with these things.

Sadly, he aimed low and hired people who didnt have jobs (this was prior to the economic downturn) and most of them were assholes who got caught screwing around and abusing their positions to accommodate themselves.

Prior to them being hired, if I needed to buy a keyboard or a part to finish a job at a location 100 miles from corporate, with my own money, I would just save the receipt and send it to the billing department, and I would get a check cut to me.

After the bureaucrats got hired.

I had to go through the operations manager, then it had to go through the accountant, who then would send it back to the operations manager, then it would go to billing, which would have to send a form to the accounting department to approve of the purchase, and then one more time back to operations, and to HR as well. (why, I will never know)

then after 2-3 weeks of processing, I get approved for an 11 dollar purchase.

Before I left, I just found it was easier to knock on the Owner's door, tell him I need to buy something, and it was done. Just like the old days, which got me put through a few interventions by the bureaucrats, explaining to me that they had a system in place and I needed to follow it if I wanted to keep my job (oh little did they know about my plans to leave)

So the next day I buy 2 cables for some external drives the assholes were blocking me from buying, yet telling me they want the new server backups to work now.

They were pissed and my job was threatened.

Then I filed my resignation 2 days later, due to many other factors, including them.

Last I heard, that company is falling apart from the inside, most people quit, many of the oldschoolers were fired.

Oh and the bureaucrats are still in, one got fired for taking her third vacation within 6 months of starting.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no requirement or reward to be efficient, effective, considerate or frugal. After all, it isn't their money they are spending.

So bureaucrats are like bankers, or managers?

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[js_sebastian]

All kinds of people enjoy waste and freewheeling. Government money is the largest source. But boss, compnay, NGO and even family money gets abused all the time too. There is really only one place for decency or lack thereof. In minds are hearts. And only one way to really reduce it from there, education. Prosecution makes people think twice sometimes, but doesn't really change who they are. Legislation and lawsuits and punishment just create even more social confusion, just visit some courts and lawsuits and you will see it offerts no real decency and solutions to society.

An article recently discussed on schneier's blog (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/control_fraud.html) argues otherwise... That under-deterrence creates an environment where corruption can become systemic and that regulatory frameworks need to be designed keeping in mind the possibility of fraud at the highest levels, and optimized to reduce it, rather than be designed based on economic models that wish corruption away as a market inefficiency that is somehow automagically eliminated by free market forces.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

All bureaucracies are inherently corrupt, which is why you need regular change. A bureaucrat's first and primary goal is to keep their job and benefits. There is no requirement or reward to be efficient, effective, considerate or frugal. After all, it isn't their money they are spending.

All bureaucracies are inherently corrupt in a closed society. Based on experience from living in Sweden in the pre-EU-membership era: If a bureaucracy is open for scrutinizing, that is if anybody (as in really anybody, not just a selected few) can anonymously visit and inspect a government body or contractor anytime and require any documentation they fancy with no questions asked(*), then no, all bureaucracies are not inherently corrupt. Of course, bureaucracy is boring, some corrupted offices may go under the radar for a time, because they are so boring that no sane person would scrutinize them, but sooner or later there is a citizen, may even be a journalist, that is insane/dedicated enough to cope with the boring. The Swedish government used to be the government analogue to Open Source and it worked pretty well.

(*) Government(**) bureaucrats in Sweden are by law prohibited to ask anybody that request documents or a visit of their name or purpose. Unfortunatly, the places and documents open to inspection have become very few since Sweden became an EU member in 1994 and since then have to follow EU regulations.
(**) Actually, not just government, but all organsiations classified as "myndigheter". I don't think there is any English word for that concept, it includes all government agencies, but also some private organisations.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[h00manist]

I agree. Markets enjoy corruption and monopolies, they are perfectly compatible in my opinion.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[floorgoblin]

I don't get this argument. Isn't the same thing true for most of the private sector? In most cases, people get paid a salary, and the company's money isn't their money either, it belongs to the owner or shareholders. So corporate workers and government workers are the same in most cases, in the sense that their only incentive for working hard is to keep their jobs, and perhaps get a promotion.

It's true that there may be less incentive for the top-level folks, although in some ways they are incentivized by the fact that, if their particular bureaucracy screws up or fails in some way, there may be a public outcry for their resignation, or perhaps they'll get voted out of office depending on position.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[Pharmboy]

Not exactly. Most jobs in the US are in small businesses, and typically the kind with less than 20 employees, so the owner and/or manager has pretty close ties to every dollar being spent. Relatively few jobs are in mega sized companies. Also, many companies have profit sharing, which always reminds every employee to keep costs under control.

Is there wasteful spending? Sure, but no where near the degree that there is in public service. When I was in the military, each quarter we had to go and get supplies we didn't need to use up our budget, else our budget would get cut next quarter. That kind of stuff is common in public service and unheard of in the private sector, at least in mid or small biz.

Re:Yes, the Dept. of Interior is corrupt

[jonaskoelker]

"myndigheter". I don't think there is any English word for that concept

"Authorities"? (We say "myndigheder" in Denmark, fwiw)

Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[Toe, The]

It is pretty amusing, because I have repeatedly seen government (and corporate) IT talk about avoiding Macs because they are a Single Source Solution: you can't buy Macs from anyone but Apple, so you are locked into dealing with only one vendor. Then these same people would turn around and specify Microsoft Windows solutions. Precisely how many vendors do they think make Microsoft Windows?

If any of these people were honestly interested in avoiding vendor lock-in, they would require that all solutions be free and open source software. And preferably "open source hardware," if there actually can be said to be such a thing.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[jimicus]

Actually, I can see some (albeit twisted) logic.

You can run Windows on any old hardware, and if Microsoft were to cease to exist tomorrow, you could continue to install Windows on new hardware. Sure, you'd have to look to migrate off Windows sooner or later but - and here is the big but - you wouldn't be essentially forced to before you start to see hardware failing around your ears. Not so OS X - if Apple were to cease to exist tomorrow, you'd find yourself stuck.

Less of an issue today now that Macs run Intel processors, but you'd be putting together a bunch of bastardised hackintoshes which you hope will work. Possibly. As long as (insert feature here) is not important.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[Belial6]

Except it isn't MS ceasing to exist tomorrow. It is MS going out of business. No matter what happens to MS, the copyrights on Windows will continue to be in force in exactly the same way the the MacOS copyrights will be in force. If the Government decides to start commuting copyright infringement, or decides to eminent domain the OS, they are in no different of a situation with Apple than they are with MS. They are buying standard PC hardware, and either writing the drivers themselves, or having someone else do it for them.

The only thing that makes a hackintosh "bastardised" is that the copyright owner of the OS goes out of their way to shut down distributes and the writers of drivers for non-approved hardware. If they disappeared tomorrow, so would the only barrier to having MacOS run on the rest of the PC hardware.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[Bert64]

If Microsoft were to cease existing tomorrow, you couldn't legally install windows on new hardware (violation of the license agreement even if there might not be anyone around to enforce it), and newer versions might make that even more difficult because the activation servers they need to talk to would also have ceased to exist.

I can see the logic in not using macs, but i can also see the same logic being applied against using windows. Sure windows can run on relatively open hardware, but it is a far cry from linux in that regard and having multi source hardware running single source software somewhat defeats the point.

With linux, you have multiple commercial sources (redhat, novell, ubuntu, oracle etc) combined with non commercial sources (debian, gentoo, centos etc etc etc) that aside from being available from multiple suppliers, also comes with source code and redistribution rights and so significantly reducing the reliance on any of those suppliers anyway.

Also, linux runs on a much wider range of hardware, not just x86 and its compatibles but also entirely different architectures like arm, sparc and powerpc.

There is also the argument that OSX is considerably more open than windows (in terms of network protocols and file formats rather than hardware support), so that although their platform is single source it would be considerably less painful to migrate away from it...

For anything important, i wouldn't use either mac or windows because of the single source issue.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[znerk]

...if Microsoft were to cease to exist tomorrow, you could continue to install Windows on new hardware...

The fundamental logical flaw in your argument would be that if Microsoft ceased to exist, you could not legally authenticate your Windows license.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[petermgreen]

I don't think apple or MS ceasing to exist tomorrow is a realistic fear unless there is a nuclear war or something. Even if MS did dissapear though i'm sure the governement could introduce an interim law that allowed vendors to keep supplying windows hardware until a permanent soloution could be found. With apple you would have to run your OS on hardware where it has never had any significant testing.

A much more immediate concern though is supply chain foul-ups. If the supply chain for a MS OEM fouls up you just go to another one. If the supply chain for apple fouls up you are SOL.

Given the choice between single vendor software on single vendor hardware VS single vendor software on multi-vendor hardware i'd definately prefer the latter.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[Kaenneth]

Except the the source of Microsoft OS's and Applications are (to my understanding) held in 3rd party escrow, and (very, like federal govt. sized) large contracts probably have clauses that will have the source code released to them if MS goes out of business, or is otherwise unable to provide contining support past a particular time (hence the 'end of life' of XP and such.)

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

A better point would be that MS does not force single source hardware, while Apple does.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[SheeEttin]

And preferably "open source hardware," if there actually can be said to be such a thing.

http://www.google.com/search?q=open source hardware

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[jimicus]

Which brings us to the question: why couldn't a similar agreement be reached with Apple? The ease with which a Hackintosh can be produced demonstrates that OS X is not that tightly tied down to Apple hardware - there is absolutely no question that Apple could put their own version of OS X that will install on any old PC (drivers permitting) in escrow.

Of course, Apple only moved over to x86, what, four, five years ago now? So you can see why this may not have sunk in at a government level yet. And you do still get questions asked about non-Microsoft products which are obviously borne of the idea that the Internet is proprietary and requires a specific OS.

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[RMH101]

Presumably because Apple doesn't want to bid for these contracts, and would prefer to make money from selling expensive hardawre to hipsters, and making money hand over fist from their new position of media vendor? Look at their financials - they're not exactly doing badly...

Re:Single Source vs. Open Source vs.... Microsoft?

[gl4ss]

googles hosted applications are actually _the_ single source solution.

The Most Corrupt Department

[Doc Ruby]

The Interior Department was the most corrupt department (that we know of) during the Bush/Cheney administration. It was the main feeding grounds for Jack Abramoff, centered on using Indian tribes to grab casino industry money. It was the Interior Department's MMS office that traded favors to oil corps for coke and hookers, then let BP drill the Gulf despite its obvious contempt for safety, and let it slide through the resulting Macondo Well blowout through this Summer.

"Most corrupt department" was the hardest fought competition this whole decade, and it's clearly continued even after Bush/Cheney left. I am not at all surprised that the Interior Department is in bed with another monopoly disserving the people it's supposed to protect.

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[jimicus]

"Most corrupt department" was the hardest fought competition this whole decade, and it's clearly continued even after Bush/Cheney left. I am not at all surprised that the Interior Department is in bed with another monopoly disserving the people it's supposed to protect.

OT, but of course it has. You don't honestly think all those government mandarins who have spent decades empire building are going to give it all up and change their MO altogether just because someone else is warming the seat in the oval office?

FFI, watch "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister".

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[starfishsystems]

"Most corrupt department" was the hardest fought competition this whole decade.

Hmm. Well, at least there was competition, wasn't there? I mean, surely somewhere an RFP was issued for that.

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the Interior Department's MMS office that traded favors to oil corps for coke and hookers

yeah, they should have at least considered pepsi and "escort" services.

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[kenh]

Utah would like to disagree and get back the nearly 25% of the state the federal Gov't took in the last days of Clinton's presidency...

Corrupt is in the eye of the one who's land was seized...

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[Doc Ruby]

All of Utah's territory was taken from the nations who lived there before, largely by the Federal government. So Utahans' claim to the land isn't really compelling.

Besides, that Federal land is given to Utah corporations for free or cheap ranching and mining/drilling, without paying taxes on owning it.

Corrupt is in the eye of the one paying the bill. Since I pay for Utah to get back 7% more than it pays (and as much as 45% more, in 1987) from Federal spending in the state, as my state loses 21% net, I can see where the real corruption lands.

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[sumdumass]

You do realize that the Interior department is over all internal issues within the government or the United states right? It's by default the most expansive or largest agency, bureaucracy the US government has. If there is any corruption going on, it would most likely be there first by default. And this corruption most likely stems from way back before Bush was every thought of as a president.

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[Doc Ruby]

The Defense Department is the biggest. And you're probably right on your principle - the DoD is probably also the most corrupt. And none of it started with Bush.

But that doesn't change the unprecedented and unsustainable depths of corruption demonstrated in the Interior Department - and in the Defense Department. Though perhaps all that differed was that Bush's administration was incompetent to keep it looking so bad. Probably because they knew they'd get away with it. Except perhaps for Abramoff and the relatively lower level gang he got busted, though Abramoff's out already.

Re:The Most Corrupt Department

[sac13]

The Interior Department was the most corrupt department (that we know of) during the Bush/Cheney administration. It was the main feeding grounds for Jack Abramoff, centered on using Indian tribes to grab casino industry money. It was the Interior Department's MMS office that traded favors to oil corps for coke and hookers, then let BP drill the Gulf despite its obvious contempt for safety, and let it slide through the resulting Macondo Well blowout through this Summer.

"Most corrupt department" was the hardest fought competition this whole decade, and it's clearly continued even after Bush/Cheney left. I am not at all surprised that the Interior Department is in bed with another monopoly disserving the people it's supposed to protect.

Imagine a day when people realize that the government isn't corrupt only when people they disagree with are in power...

Maybe that'll be the day that we can actually deal with our problems in an honest and pragmatic way...

But, for now, we're arguing over whose flavor of kool-aid we should be drinking... I'll just have to take your word as to how delicious the one you're drinking is...

Video of how it works

[Myopic]

I couldn't visualize it from the description, but this video shows how it works

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UesbkO3NvoY

Pretty crazy. It'll come down to whether they can actually make something like that reliable.

Re:Video of how it works

[Myopic]

Sonofabitchwrongarticlesorryguys.

Re:Video of how it works

[xmundt]

Dont worry about it...not only was it more interesting,
it actually looked like a pretty good car-based analogy
for what is being discussed here.
          After all, it is a complicated mechanism, with pseudo-sexual
movements that may or may not work.
            regards
            dave mundt

Re:Video of how it works

[human-cyborg]

Thanks a lot. I just spent the past HOUR watching videos of experimental engine designs on YouTube, instead of doing actual work. All thanks to your one link.

Now I'm gonna have to stay an hour late today.

I should really stop reading /. while on coffee break.

Vendors

[HogGeek]

A lot of discussion on "How come only Microsoft".

While I agree it's not "competitive", I think they are looking for bids on hosting a Microsoft based solution - not Microsoft, the company, providing the hosting

Re:Vendors

[nine-times]

I don't think that really makes it much better. Either way, they're favoring a specific company rather than requesting specific functionality.

Re:Vendors

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they are looking for bids on hosting a Microsoft based solution - not Microsoft, the company, providing the hosting

One article I read also mentioned the the RPQ specified Microsoft's "Cloud" solution (Business Productivity Online), I think that necessarily entails Microsoft-hosting (even if a middle-man is routing the cash).

Re:Vendors

[Mongoose Disciple]

In this case, both are the same thing. Unless Google Docs is an Exchange-based solution. A high level of interoperability with a million existing government systems effectively mandates that.

Unless we've decided it's okay if the government is hopelessly inefficient, as long as they're wasting money on Google products?

Re:Vendors

[nine-times]

Well it's a little like saying, "All our laptops must be Macs. We'll be taking quotes from Apple and MacMall and Amazon, so it's still an open bidding process."

Now maybe that might happen in some government contract, and someone will say, "Well their workflow uses software only available on the Mac, and their IT people are trained on OSX. What, you want the government to be less efficient?" That guy might have a point. Still, such a deal wouldn't benefit Apple much less than just mandating that you have to buy everything directly from Apple.

Re:Vendors

[h4rr4r]

How exactly does it demand exchange?
The damn thing is just an email server that happens to tie into some groupware. Nothing magical, lots of systems do this. Heck, just about all of them tie into AD since it is so common.

Re:Vendors

[Mongoose Disciple]

Have you ever tried supporting a business that has some of their offices on Exchange and some on something else, even something else that's supposed to be as compatible as can be?

It's not something I suggest anyone do on purpose.

You can blame Microsoft for that; it's even appropriate, but that's the pragmatic reality of it.

Re:Vendors

[Anonymous Coward]

Government department tendering process needs to be open, fair and deliver value for money.
In this case the service that they want is email and calendering. They shouldn't be asking for a particular vendors technology unless they can in some way demonstrate that the value for money outweights the open and fair part. The bottom line is that if the client can't tell its an exchange server doing the backend work then they shouldn't care and by naming a particular vendors product they have acted inappropriately.

Re:Vendors

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it different than me putting out an RFP for a linux based solution? Certainly I have the right to choose how I want a project I am paying for implemented.

Re:Vendors

[Digicrat]

Google Docs may not be, but GMail certainly has (at least partial) Exchange support - that's the best method of email sync for old WM6 phone (Disclaimer: My next phone will be Android-based).

Re:Vendors

[Kvasio]

Steve B., is that you?

Nice try (in "Steve's marketing" category)

Oh, the huge manatee...

[Eggplant62]

I certainly have to laugh at the timing of this move. I pondered a moment how effective a call to my elected officials might be at midterm election time, then said to myself, "FUUUUUUUUUU...."

Good!

[OhHellWithIt]

Been there, done that. One of my former employers essentially bet the company on a federal RFP that was seeking POSIX compliance on diskless workstations. We worked our butts off to develop a solution using SCO Unix (back in the days before SCO decided to go into litigation as a business model), but even though it met all the requirements, the contract was awarded to the incumbent, who bid Windows NT -- with some kind of POSIX plug-in. We protested (the loser always protests), but we lost. Maybe it'll turn out better for a deep-pocketed company like Google.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

We protested (the loser always protests), but we lost.

Heck, the winner often protests (aka, sues).

When I was in the government, I worked on a system where the winning contractor deliberately underbid by about 50% so as to win the contract (they were desperate for business). They won the contract. Then turned around and sued the government for the underbid amount because no reasonable person could expect them to provide such a complicated system at such a ridiculously low cost.

They won the suit and built the system. Oh, and had lots of cost overruns, too. For which they were paid.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows NT -- with some kind of POSIX plug-in

Yep, winning contracts like this is I think one of the big reasons NT/2000 had a POSIX subsystem.

Re:Good!

[phek]

One of my few government bids I did, the head of the company who won the RFI contract was contracted by the state board to help them find the best RFP proposal. Surprisingly enough the RFP contract went to the same company who wrote the RFI and who's head was contracted by the state to help them choose.

How much money flows from Feds - Microsoft?

[gQuigs]

I am wondering if anyone knows just how much money the federal goverment sends to Microsoft each year.. There has got to be somewhere I can easily find this information. And while I am at, how about for any corporation?

I would love to see the Top 10 Fed supported companies.

Re:How much money flows from Feds - Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly weapons systems:
http://washingtontechnology.com/Articles/2010/04/07/Contract-countdown.aspx?Page=1

Re:How much money flows from Feds - Microsoft?

[will_die]

It would be a little hard to figure out. You can figure that most government employees have a Microsoft end user CAL, and then do a check on basic contracts that Microsoft won for services. It would be harder to compute all the contracts won by other companies that then purchase Microsoft software. However the prices the DoD gets are cheap compared to the regular volume price, for instance you can get a MSDN subscription for 3 year at a cheaper price that the regular volume price subscription is for 1 year.
See http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2009.aspx for 2009 technology companies. Most contracts are public record so you can get the figures if you want to do the searching.
However the DoD is the largest Microsoft customer and was able to use its weight to force Microsoft to extent support for Windows 2000 when the move to Windows 2k3 was taking to long.

Re:How much money flows from Feds - Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see the Top 10 Fed supported companies.

AIG
Citigroup
Bank of America
JPMorgan Chase
Wells Fargo
GMAC Financial Services
General Motors
Goldman Sachs
Morgan Stanley
PNC Financial Services Group

Re:How much money flows from Feds - Microsoft?

[AHuxley]

The new trick is self compliance. You have to report back via software just how many machines use the software you paid for. Less of the system wide "bulk deal". They milk every unit of product sold (rented) and you have to do the milking (server to send back usage $).

Huge surprise

[DougDot]

Hey, M$ bought that contract fair & square! Check out this story for one perspective on MicroSoft's US governmental buying power: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/oss-europe-vs-united-states

Re:Huge surprise

[RightSaidFred99]

Haha. You even used the M$ moniker. Your post is mostly funny to me because Microsoft didn't win this contract, and because you don't know what you're talking about.

Corruption in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Eons ago, America had worked heavily to wipe Corruption. America was the land of the good. Now, we are increasingly not much different than any 3rd world nation.

Re:Corruption in the USA

[Nadaka]

I am doing my part. Voting against Rick Scott (R) for Florida governor tomorrow. In what insane world can a guy that pleaded the 5th 75 times in relation to defrauding social security and insider trading be a viable candidate?

I am not a democrat, but OMG WTF BBQ!, I can't vote my preferred 3rd party candidate and risk him winning.

It's not aimed really at MS

[AnonymousClown]

The specs say that "Specifically, the DOI stated upfront in the RFQ that the solution had to be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite."

So what's the problem? That's their specs.

And looking at the complaint, it just looks like the DOI wanted to use one messaging system, Microsoft's, and settled on it. Google was trying to push their system. There's a lot of shit going on here and it just looks like Google didn't get their way and is using their money to bully their way.

Oh wait, this is Slashdot and it's Microsoft involved. Never mind.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[h4rr4r]

Why can the DOI preselect one vendor?
If you are going to do that you may as well not even have bids.

This is like saying postal trucks will now be bid out, anyone who wants to bid must provide ford built vehicles.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[Dr_Barnowl]

It's not an RFQ if it states that only one party can fulfill the requirements. It's a public rubberstamp.

There are reasons the rules say you have to put things out to tender - to prevent corruption, to get the best value for public money. To subvert that process by putting out a tender that states that only one party will be considered is to openly laugh in the face of those reasons.

Of course Google was trying to push their system. This is how sales works. Microsoft was no doubt pushing just as hard, but the suspicion is obviously that they were pushing dirty too.

It may well be that the MS system can meet the requirements better - especially when the requirements probably include "compatibility with MS Office". But you win the contract by meeting the requirements, not having the requirements written to meet you.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[clone53421]

It's not an RFQ if it states that only one party can fulfill the requirements. It's a public rubberstamp.

It doesn’t. It just specifies that whoever builds the system needs to use Microsoft’s software. Microsoft is mainly in the business of selling software, not necessarily building complete systems... it’s quite possible that they’d price themselves out of the bidding for this and let some other contractor purchase their software licenses and actually do the hard work of building the system from the ground up.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[Mongoose Disciple]

Any number of independent contractors can bid on the contract -- but their bid has to be a Microsoft-based solution. Probably for optimal compatability with any number of things outside the scope of this particular contract.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[bloodhawk]

This doesn't break the rules at all, anyone can fullfill the tender, even google. Tenders can and regularly do specify what technology must be used for many reasons from required compatibility to bakeoffs already having taken place before the tender. The tender is to determine WHO does the work, not what tech is used.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[h4rr4r]

No, this has to be using the MS cloud hosting which MS does. No matter who is billing you.

Compatibility could be required instead of a solution, which proves this to merely be the result of corruption.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[h4rr4r]

No, "Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite" is provided by MS only. The DIO requires a product that only one vendor can provide.

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

This doesn't break the rules at all, anyone can fullfill the tender, even google.

How so? The request didn't say it had to be interoperable with MS's service, it said it had to use MS's service. How does Google do that?

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[bloodhawk]

MS have made agreements with various partners to also deliver BPOS, they are not the only possible people to buy from at all. Just from my dealings around this I know that at least CSC is a possible option. They also have various options around private clouds which can be run by the client rather than by the vendor (unlike google).

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[huzur79]

Google buys the MS licenses, builds the system to spec and bills the government for the work done....

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Is CSC actually installing their own copy of BPOS? All I could tell from their public marketing speak just made it sound like they were "selling" BPOS alongside their own cloud services, but Microsoft was still actually doing the BPOS hosting.

e.g.
"CSC will offer a compelling choice of private cloud customer-managed and public cloud services combined with Microsoft Online Services"

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[zippthorne]

Yeah, but then MS decides not to extend the usual discounts when google is buying, so that their competitors bids all come in lower. Thus, without ever being the vendor the government deals with, Microsoft actually gets the best part of the deal: no matter what, they sell licenses AND they get to pick the winner...

Re:It's not aimed really at MS

[huzur79]

Then google could sue MS, and I don't see why MS would even bother because it makes no difference to them. When I look for solutions at work its gotta work with Exchange and AD because thats what our systems are. Im not about to change everything over to fit a small need in one area. This is no different.

Our tax dollars at work...

[chrisbell]

...supporting M$ - since they are no longer solidly the technology company with the largest market cap.

Blah blah blah it's BOOOSH'S fault!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're going to see how well that works tomorrow.

Re:Blah blah blah it's BOOOSH'S fault!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah..like the Repubs taking over the House will really change things. Go back to hiding your head in the sand.

Is try before you buy legally binding now?

[vlueboy]

There is less and less reason to believe in Google as a company. It doesn't seem like anything was signed.

Google was not an interested party

DOI forgot to s/interested/interesting/ to lessen the blow to Google. The government's fault was in creating rage and adding gas to that fire... I'd be angry too if an prospective employer pulled the same thing off in a job offer, daring to say I wasn't an interested party, though I went to their interview.

But just like my example, in most of the United States, a plaintiff with no signed agreement has little power to demand anything from the alleged agreement.

Re:Is try before you buy legally binding now?

[RobKow]

This is the meaning of "interested party" that means that Google had a stake in the decision, not merely that it showed some desire to be considered.

Re:Is try before you buy legally binding now?

[zippthorne]

So, we have to rely on vendors getting signed statements to make sure that our government officials are doing due diligence when spending our money?

It's like buying a shed and demanding all the screws be from Home Depot. As if you can't build a decent shed without Home Depot screws. Of course Google is upset, but we all should be upset, not just gloat over google's apparently making a mistake in not having the right paperwork. What is this, Brazil?

The fact is, they should have specified the desired functionality, not the underlying implementation. Let the vendors worry about the implementation details.

Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[Charliemopps]

It seems pretty clear that the Governments primary objection was to the fact that the servers providing service would have to be run by Google instead of by the government. Google simply said "you don't need to have the servers on site to be secure, don't worry about it!" I'm not sure that the RFQ was done correctly, but their true concerns are valid. I wouldn't want any government services hosted in anyones cloud, the chance for abuse is huge.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[garcia]

I read the complaint. Google argues that the solution offered by Microsoft is new and the only publicly available information about it and its security is a press release from Microsoft. It further states that due to this newness that no other government agencies are using the product and thus it has not been tested in the field.

Now, I'm not here to argue the merits of Google's claims or the security factors in allowing a third party to host the servers for you--even if they have received some sort of accreditation by some body which apparently states which are secure enough. All I am saying is that based on the complaint it appears as if Google has an interesting case and one which they will lose simply because that's how the government works.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

"DOI determined that it would acquire a single hosted email and collaboration services solution"..."Specifically, the DOI stated upfront in the RFQ that the solution had to be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite." => Microsoft's Cloud

Also, Google has distinct, dedicated datacenters for their "government cloud" offerings.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[cdrguru]

But just think of the marketing intelligence value of scanning all the government email.

While it might not be all that valuable to Google's usual marketing intelligence customers, it would open up whole new markets to Greenpeace, Sierra Club and North Korea.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[nutznboltz]

Microsoft simply said "you don't need to have the servers off site to be secure, don't worry about it!"

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply: Bull. Google's MODERATE status under FISMA alleviates DoI from any concern about who runs the servers. That kind of thinking is completely incomparable with non-private cloud computing. For that matter, there are a fair number of federal agencies who contract out email services, and those agencies certainly don't host their own email server farms. Hell, do that and you throw out the entire reason for cloud computing. I'd lay you odds that the Microsoft solution isn't run on DoI servers either. My personal experience with contracted email services is that the company contracting service has NO hardware infrastructure requirements for email storage/retrieval.

Anyway, FISMA is the mandated (by law) gold standard for US Government IT security. If DoI passes over a company who does have that certification for a company that doesn't, then they should be sued.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I get an Amen for a sensible reply.

Google hosting anything for the government is a bad idea.

Google already collects enough information on everyone that they know when are where you will make your next bowel movement.

Do we really need to give them access to more information....?

I used to think Bill Gates was the master of assimilation, now I believe google has assimilated everyone except microsoft.

Government Servers and Software should NEVER be hosted by anyone except the government.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

TBH I'd trust google's staff to secure the government's data more than I would the fucked up military industrial complex. They aren't exactly famous for securing their systems or detecting breaches. Google on the other hand pays people to report issues, and resolves them in short order.

If a hole was found (0 day especially) on a government run platform, the hole would likely remain until the vendor patched the issue. Typically google engineers will patch other vendor's problems, report the issue to the vendor and already have a fix in place by the time the vendor releases a "supported" fix.

I'm not sayin, but I'm sayin.

Re:Did anyone actually read the complaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

you mitigate the chance for abuse with physical intrusion detection systems, cameras, a private cloud, etc.

Go Google

[sosaited]

This is probably the only lawsuit I read about on Slashdot that I am going to support. Well done Google. And DOI must be lacking some sense these days to call it RFQ when they specified they will only consider bids from one company.

Re:Go Google

[gl4ss]

not really, they just worded it that you couldn't just sell them a slice from a cloud. I'd have worded it the same if I wanted to know where the servers are - to which they probably have a legal obligation.

SYNTAX ERROR

[Orionn2000au]

It should read "Google Sues US Gov't For Considering Only Microsoft". It's a slippery slope, people. The next thing you know, people will be using the word "alternate" when they mean "alternative".

Re:SYNTAX ERROR

[nutznboltz]

"Google Sues US Gov't For Merely Considering Microsoft (you know what we mean.)"

Re:SYNTAX ERROR

[worx101]

And that's how language grows and evolves... Do you speak the same English that was spoken 100 year ago? Who actually penned the grammatical rules for English anyway? The point of language is to understand and be understood.

pot meet kettle?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/24/spy-agency-amends-bid-contract-notice-google-favored/

The agency's online synopsis indicated that the agency wants to steer the contract to Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., on a no-bid basis because “Google is the only source that can meet the government's requirement for worldwide access, unlimited processing, and Open Geospatial Consortium complaint web service interfaces.”

But Microsoft, the computer behemoth headquartered in Redmond, Wash., has indicated that it believes its Bing Maps program can also meet the agency's needs. In response to several calls, the agency told Fox News that a number of “interested parties” had met a Tuesday evening deadline for formally challenging the agency’s no-bid plan.

Standard, open specifications?

[h00manist]

Well, thinking of it as just any company, not some big corrupt group, their objective could be simply to keep compatibility with this that and the other. Which brings up interesting questions. Open source can be an open specification, yes, but not really, it's just another imposition. It doesn't really guarantee compatibility, short or re-writing huge chunks of something. How could these specs be made? It would perhaps bring forward all kinds of "compatibility profiles", for mail servers, database servers, applications, etc. I believe the army has some of those.

Mod Parent Up

[VGPowerlord]

I admit, I laughed when I read that list. Then I frowned because it's so true.

Speaking of bias

[bonch]

Speaking of bias, what about the FTC ending their privacy probe into Google just days after Google execs hosted an Obama fundraiser, which also happened on the same day that it was reported that Google dodges enough taxes to only pay a 2.4% corporate income tax, the lowest of its technology peers? I guess Google wants to pretend only Microsoft gets preferential treatment.

Re:Speaking of bias

[nedlohs]

So the FTC should investigate forever?

Companies following the tax laws shouldn't be allowed to raise money for political purposes? Political parties shouldn't take such money?

You're off by an order of magnitude on that effective tax rate. Hint, foreign tax != corporate income tax.

Re:Speaking of bias

[zippthorne]

It's true that we can only rely on google to protest when the preferential treatment prefers other than google, but if every company dealing with the government always bitched about everything all the other companies get away with, we'd know a lot more about what's going on, and maybe a lot less of it would be going on.

It isn't just the US DOI

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has been doing a huge push to government entities to claim that only Microsoft has "unified/consolidated email" and "enhanced security", and thus any non-Microsoft system must be abolished. This has included planting their shills inside government.

Forget POP3, IMAP, most of SMTP, and any open source products.

This has been going on for years. I'm surprised that ./ finally noticed.

Re:It isn't just the US DOI

[AHuxley]

MS has the skills to lose your data locally, Google will have to close that local support gap.

O.o

[Heratiki]

Hello immovable object... Meet unstoppable force... ROUND 1 FIGHT!

Like the way BP was "not an interested party"?

[fkx]

Like the way BP was "not an interested party" in the Gulf Oil Spill?

Well, they didn't seem all that interested at first.

I'm on the fence

[DaMattster]

This is a tough one to have a position on as there are interesting arguments for and against both Google and Microsoft. On one hand, I am none to keen on entrusting data to a third party's (Google) cloud-based system as there exists the potential for Google to abuse this. On the other hand, Google could release information documenting rampant abuse by government thereby providing some transparency and taking some control away from government. This is a thorny issue with no really good solution because if government controls its own mail servers a la Exchange, there exists the opportunity for a rogue official to make emails vanish. It would probably be best to have an independent oversight committee but, even that, creates more cogs in the bureaucracy.

Re:I'm on the fence

[Fujisawa Sensei]

This is a tough one to have a position on as there are interesting arguments for and against both Google and Microsoft. On one hand, I am none to keen on entrusting data to a third party's (Google) cloud-based system as there exists the potential for Google to abuse this. On the other hand, Google could release information documenting rampant abuse by government thereby providing some transparency and taking some control away from government. This is a thorny issue with no really good solution because if government controls its own mail servers a la Exchange, there exists the opportunity for a rogue official to make emails vanish. It would probably be best to have an independent oversight committee but, even that, creates more cogs in the bureaucracy.

I would rather risk my data with someone who could abuse it, Google. Than someone I'm certain is going to abuse it, Microsoft.

Re:I'm on the fence

[sloth jr]

There is always potential for abuse, regardless of where your data is hosted. Wikileaks gets their thousands of documents from persons that supposedly are authorized to be effective stewards of critical information. For FISMA and the more stringent DIACAP, no one just takes your word for it that it's secured. You demonstrate that security, and the auditors tear you apart. Now, it could well be that it's not 100% secure - it depends if you actually believe in 100% security (I don't). You make risk assessments pertaining to the value of the data you are protecting, and put up controls that reasonably protect those assets. I've built both FISMA (NIST 800) and DIACAP hosting environments. It is neither fun nor easy, but for many use cases, it makes as much sense as any other cloud solution.

Google will provide backdoor decryption too

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like Google wants to be a player with the government too.
But the gov bodies aren't sure whether Google will play ball like Microsoft has shown.
I mean... when is the last time you saw MS take a stand against the demands of Chinese leaders? (see Bing censorship)
Google, you need to make your offer more clear. Specifically:
    Are you or are you not going to give user decryption keys to allow one gov body to spy on the communication of the other?
cause If not... your just aint a playa.

Xbox 360 has a monopoly on...

[tepples]

If it's to play particular games, watch videos etc, your needs may be better suited by a PS3 or Wii, or even a PC

For one thing, there are plenty of Xbox 360 exclusive games. For another, Xbox 360 is the only platform that officially allows indie development of video games designed for hardware that is commonly used with large screens. PCs can be connected to large HDTV screens but aren't in practice (apart from the tiny market of HTPC geeks, which CronoCloud has assured me is insignificant), and PS3 and Wii have no counterpart to XNA Creators Club.

Low bid using only Microsoft solutions?

[ibsteve2u]

Sounds like the winner is predestined to source support from India, Bangladesh, or the People's Republic of China, doesn't it? Or maybe from an Microsoft-centric equivalent of "SEK, a state-run animation studio of North Korea" as per the /. story on the Simpsons?

Deeper pockets than the usual loser

[wonkavader]

"All I am saying is that based on the complaint it appears as if Google has an interesting case and one which they will lose simply because that's how the government works."

Companies lose court cases, generally, because the gov has unlimited funds and time, and they don't. But Google DOES have unlimited funds and time, and if they can get all gov departments to be forced to consider them, they might consider fighting this long and hard. They might not lose. They probably will, I gather, but maybe not.

I never knew...

[kenh]

I never knew Google was a Microsoft VAR/Reseller.

Seriously, if an RFQ can't limit the acceptable technology, what is the point? If a Gov't agency put out an RFQ for AutoCAD, do they really have to entertain a quote from Google Sketch?

If they put out an RFQ for pick-up trucks, must they analyze quotations for Suburbans?

Get past Google bs. Microsoft, and the stupidity of this outrage is obvious.

I suspect someone confused RFP with RFQ - one is to pick a solution (RFP) and one is to price a solution you've decided on (RFQ) - they are not interchangeable.

Re:I never knew...

[JonJ]

If a Gov't agency put out an RFQ for AutoCAD, do they really have to entertain a quote from Google Sketch?

Maybe they're not supposed to put out an RFQ for specific programs, but rather specific functionality and make sure that retraining is included if applicable.

Re:I never knew...

[KarmaMB84]

A request for quote is precisely what you use when you want someone to quote you a price for a specific thing you want.

They probably want to just go with BOPS so they can just sync their existing Active Directory and Exchange system with it and put some people on the new system and keep people who send and receive stuff they really really don't want in the cloud on their on-premises e-mail system.

It goes back to the beginning of the country.

[garyebickford]

It's been going on since at least the 1810s. There was even some going on during the Revolution.

Bottom line: the bigger the governmental entity, the more attractive it is as a target for corruption. Therefore, the best solution is to minimize the size of governmental entities, and __Watch the little ones closely__.

By way of (distant) analogy, neighborhood watch tends to be much more effective at preventing localized crime than police patrols by a big city police department.

Rampant ignorance on Google's part

[kenh]

How many people have firm opinions that the government did something wrong here - show of hands please?

How many people know the differences between an RFQ, RFP, and an IFB? Why did so many hands go down?

Seriously, an RFQ is a tool to arrive at market price for a defined solution, and it is non-binding.

An RFP is a request for respondents to define a solution, the Gov't is open to various solutions.

And an IFB is an Invitation To Bid - this is where the Gov't picks a vendor for a defined solution based on price.

Every response i see here has these three different documents conflated... I suggest you look here for guidance:

http://www.onvia.com/b2g-resources/article/responding-to-an-ifb-rfp-rfq-do-you-know-the-difference

Re:Rampant ignorance on Google's part

[Arimus]

Agree. For an RFQ the requesting authority can, and do, specify what ever they like, they can even specify the entire technical solution down to the silicon level if they desire.

Without knowing the full details of what MS and Google are fighting over hard to say but is this RFQ for a specific solution (it appears to be from the article) and so more a vendor search rather than an oh we need a new toy to do some stuff so lets have some ideas...

Taxpayers could ratify RFQ to open-source code

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wouldn't want any government services hosted in anyones cloud, the chance for abuse is huge." --- This is the kind of thing only a Microserf would say to persuade the audience they are doing the right design for the greater good of all taxpayers.

Come on the Google Engineers aren't idiots. They could architect an internal government area wide cloud providing all the services. Any excuse I'm hearing about not letting Google bid in this RFQ is definitely rooted in bribery and corruption. Google has proven they have the know-how to deliver something scaleable, fast and respectably secure.

The added benefit of having Google Engineers work on it is they are experienced in making their source code public and accessible. Taxpayers could ratify the RFQ and ensure all taxpayers see all the source code for the project as one of the product deliverables. Microsoft isn't so apt to making product source code public.

If the government is truly sincere about making itself accountable and transparent, they should open-source any project that the tax-payers pay for and make it part of every project deliverable on an on-going basis throughout every phase in the project lifecycle. Otherwise I'm inclined to say the politicians and government department officials are corrupt and don't have interests of the taxpayers at heart.

I work for a security company and .....

[Anonymous Coward]

I take calls from sales reps who design intercom or security systems, they are given a requirements list and half the time they spell out a specific company. Hardware, software, it doesnt matter. People who want companies to place bids on setup, install and maintiennece, will spell out a specific company and require everyone to submit bids on it. Is this fair to our competitors? Not at all. Half the time the client wants to use something familiar or use a company that previously worked great for them.

If you have a voice intercom system that lasted 20 years without fail and you want to upgrade the whole system, guess what, you'll probably wont accept anything other than the brand that lasted you 20 years of service.

This is not unusual or new.

RFP, RFQ and Public Aquisitions

[spopepro]

I was starting to reply to a bunch of comments, but figured I'd just start anew since the misunderstandings are widespread. It seems like very few here have experience with public sector RFPs and RFQs. Even if you worked for a company that has submitted responses I wouldn't be surprised if you got it wrong. We (school district) just canceled because all 10 vendors were non-responsive by not reading and answering the requirements.

You write up an RFP when you know your problem and you need a solution. Language often specifies a technology, but allows for equivalent substitutions. Protests often happen over debate of what qualifies as equivalent, but if the DOI was looking for a solution, they would write an RFP.

But they weren't looking for a solution, they were looking for a vendor, and already knew what solution they wanted. That's when you write an RFQ, specify exactly the technology you want and then let everyone submit pricing. The disadvantage is that you have to choose the low quotation. In an RFP, you do not have to take the low proposal, even in the public sector.

So it might feel wrong, but way before the RFQ was even written the DOI determined that they wanted the Microsoft solution and just wanted pricing. Google lost before it even started. Which is probably short sighted by the DOI, but well within the law. As a public sector person who deals with this, it's not easy to get what you know you need at a price you want. Most public entities aren't being corrupt, but like someone else mentioned, the spirit of the law has long been lost and both sides spend inordinate amounts of time and money just trying to game the system. Like the vendor who protested that his 7200rpm SATA drive SAN was equivalent to the 15k SAS version and that he won on price... ugh.

Re:RFP, RFQ and Public Aquisitions

[Danathar]

The law says MS's solution must be FISMA certified. MS's solution is not FISMA certified.

Until it is, it's not a product that they can use. Definitely NOT as a pilot with government data on it.

That's what happens when...

[Anonymous Coward]

one company's politics are more Obama agenda friendly than another.

Competition in Contracting Act

[nutznboltz]

I just wanted one freaking post in this forum to use the phrase "Competition in Contracting Act". Now one does.

This is the way it works

[rrking]

What most people are missing is that they are not only allowing Microsoft to quote, they are asking for a quote from anyone and will pick the lowest option. They are only specifing that it has to be for a Microsoft solution. As for restricting to a Microsoft product this is done on almost all RFQ's. Police departments Restric RFQ to Ford Crown vics because that is the vehicle they have a support network for. CA CHP restricted their firearms RFQ to S&W 4006 because that is the only weapon they have straind and have repair people for. (This one went thru multiple appeals from other gun vendors, in the end the state mad it case that it was unsafe to support multiple weapon platforms in training and equipment) The DOD purchases Cisco hardware and its RFQ only support Cisco hardware. This is because all the training is done on Cisco hardware and we can just re-train every time they purchase anothe grup of equipment. I deal with local govt that request a quote for a VFD, PLC, Contactors, Pilot devices and they specify the devices have to be A-B as this is what they have standardized to. This restricts it to a platform. They have people trained on a platform Microsoft, If they had to change or support multiple programs just to be fair the cost would be prohibitive. I know people hate Microsoft but it is a defacto standard in the IT industry since there are so many people trained on how to support.

Re:This is the way it works

[jonwil]

So you write the RFQ or whatever so that it says "vehicles must be compatible with Ford Crown Victoria spare parts, maintanence proceedures and support" not "vehicles must be crown victorias"

That way, anyone who can build a vehicle that will slot right into the police departmnent support networks without any need for driver/mechanic/etc retraining or re-purchase of spares/equipment/etc can win.

Re:This is the way it works

[rrking]

I dont mean to sound like an A-Hole but. In the real world of govt and business you want your fleet or equipment to be the same so you can train on it. The example you gave while I see your point even if somebody decided to copy the crown vic now they just broke the law (by copying sombody elese product to the T) or it would be different enough not to be stadard. The govt agency also has to look at the support of the product. If they company copied the crown vic and supplied it and then went out of business who would support the product on recalls, warantee, ect. Where this becomes a littel fair is the govt doesn't buy these cars from Ford, They accept quotes from dealers and pick the dealer who offers the best price. I deal with this every day in my line of work where the dominant player Allen Bradly gets spec'd and they dont even consider alternatives as they are traind on this product.

Just thinking outside the box.. really..

[nanospook]

The US Gov't is us.. Perhaps Google should start their own political party? Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Google Party.. if they have the right answers, I would vote for them..

a case of C.Y.A.

[mt1955]

In the 80's people would say "no one ever got fired for going with AT&T"

In the 90's people would say "no one ever got fired for going with Microsoft"

Anyone who has floated to the upper echelons of the DOI more likely got there by playing it safe, not rocking the boat and schmoozing the in-crowd - not by being smart - so while Google's technical arguments may be correct they don't fit the prevailing "cover your ass" mentality.

Here's hoping the law suit rips the DOI a new paradigm.

Dumb move. Here's why:

[Anonymous Coward]

To sell a product to the government that has a specification assigned to it a company needs to get their product on the QPL (Qualified Products List). This normally takes a couple of years as the test labs run established tests on the candidate product. This cannot be rushed. A lawsuit will only piss off, or amuse, the testers who may decide to take their time running tests when the system finally has been followed. I have been through this getting a specialized lubricant on the QPL. The tester did not like the owner of our company and told me, in a low voice, that "your product is good and will be approved, in due time" It took a total of two years. One CANNOT force the damn US government bureaucratic system to jump when asked to do so!

RE: Google Sues US Gov't For Only Considering ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every agency of the United Stated of America Federal Governmnet has the perogorative to ignore:

1. Any Federal Law

2. Any State Law

3. Any Local Law

4. Internation Law do not apply by nature of there Extra-governmental (U.S.A.) origin.

That said, M$ has for many year enjoyed "Sweet Heart" Deals from the Federal Governmnet.

Looks like in this case, Google is not a "Sweet Heart" of the Federal Government of United States of America.

LOL

requirement constraints

[glitch23]

The government is allowed to set any type of requirement constraints they wish in order to ensure that the final solution integrates with an existing system, meets specific security requirements (i.e. FIPS 140-2 encryption as someone already stated), etc. This is only for an RFQ anyway so the final solution is still yet to be determined but as long as a suggested solution satisfies their specific constraints and the other requirements and comes in under budget then any company can qualify. It isn't the government's problem that their constraints may disqualify Google. They probably disqualify a lot of other companies/products too. That's the nature of the beast.

You can pretty much forget free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Free software is not FIPS certified, and is not going to get certified as free software because no one will pay for certification. Redhat is certified for some versions. CentOS is not.

It may drive everyone up the wall to use Serina, instead of subversion, for content management - but one is certified & the other is not.

Ditto Putty. I'd love to use it, and know some people in the government who do ... But their asses will out the door really fast if it becomes convenient for someone to find out.

It's not worth my job to use Putty, even if it is a "better" product than SSH/Tectia. Read the Putty FAQ on FIPS certification, it's informative & written by people much smarter than me.

Use bitlocker-FIPS

[cheekyboy]

So isnt it cheaper to use an $8 USB stick, with software based FIPS140 via BitLocker?

Also "FIPS 140-2 Level 2 Certified USB Memory Stick Cracked"
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/fips_140-2_leve.html

Re:You can pretty much forget free software

[buchanmilne]

Free software is not FIPS certified, and is not going to get certified as free software because no one will pay for certification.

Actually, Free Software has been in the past, and could be again, if a few more vendors who would make money from FIPS-certified Free software would sign on as additional co-sponsor (one or two vendors more may be enough).

It may drive everyone up the wall to use Serina, instead of subversion, for content management - but one is certified & the other is not.

But, subversion doesn't implement encryption directly itself, if it were using OpenSSL with the FIPS module above, AFAIK, it could be shown to be FIPS compliant.

Ditto Putty. I'd love to use it,

Putty is crap, it's only real benefit is providing a terminal emulator because Microsoft can't be bothered to supply one with their OS which is convenient to use (why else would putty ship with telnet support ...). If there was a decent terminal emulator, just Mingw binaries for OpenSSH would probably be much more pupular ... and those would have a chance at FIPS compliance (there are some patches around for OpenSSH FIPS compliance).

And if your goal is GoogleDocs over MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

And if your goal is GoogleDocs over MS Office you can list about a thousand things that Google Docs does that MS Office doesn't.

Probably an easy 90% are features that aren't used.

Ok, I'm gonna bash m$

[harris s newman]

I just upgraded to Office 7 at work, and I absolutely HATE IT. I have been using office for years, and it's ok up to the ribbon interface. Yes, Google has some issues, but it's at least intuitive. I can't wait till my 79 year old dad tries to use office 7, and I have to migrate him to Open office. Microsoft, you totally blew it.

Here we avoid this problem

[Syberz]

Up here in Quebec we do things differently, we award the contract to a company of our choosing while denying the others an opportunity to bid. We then pass a law saying that doing that is just peachy.

Re:Here we avoid this problem

[toriver]

Well, for most practical purposes that is what is done here, except a third party gets to sit between Microsoft and the buyer...

bureaucratic loopholes ?

[viralMeme]

alphatel (1450715) SAYS: "It's one of those bureaucratic loopholes. Without the GSA schedule and number, you can be dismissed from any offering regardless of how much time you put in. Did they really have one? Almost seems like a bad oversight"

Do you have any verifiable citations for the above BS ?
--

"the RFQ specified that only the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite-Federal ("BPOS-Federal") could be proposed. DOI's restrictive specification was based upon a "Limited Source Justification" excuted by DOI's Director, Office of Acquisition and Property Management, on August 30, 2010. Plaintiffs protest DOI's specification of the Microsoft BPOS-Federal solution on the grounds that such specification is unduly restrictive of competition in violation of the Competition in Contracting Act .. and the DOI's "Limited Source Justification" constitutes a sole-source procurement that is arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise contrary to law."

Discussions Prior to DOI's Issuance of the RFQ

"In June 2009, Google representatives met with the DOI Chief Technology Officer ("CTO") .. Google then contacted the DOI's National Business Center's Chief Contracting Officer, Ms. Debra Glass, by sending her a formal letter of interest on May 17, 2010. That letter expressed Google's keen interest in competing for DOI's Messing solution .. On May 27, 2010, Ms Glass sent Google a letter that did not respond to or reference Google's May 17 letter, but instead requested that Google respond to fifteen broadly-worded requirements to "enhance" the DOI's market research" link

Godd for them....

[hesaigo999ca]

They should be taken to court, they themselves have broken their own rules in having a fair and just way of getting bids on contracts, and they not only should pay damages, but we should also open all the books to see how many times this happened in the past, and
make a precedent with it. Can you imagine if google won ( i really hope they do ), not only would they go up in shares again, but also would be able to next time make a claim that because of the previous rigging of the fair contract dealings, that they were owed the next one....and guess what, once they show off and get their good products in there, and get all the people used to their products , it will be the black man of that industry, once you go google, you never go back....or something like that.

I also think if less people in position of power were actually the ones to control these things instead of a separate committee that was more unbiased and had no means of being bought off, they could actually avoid these situations.

It's all about the source.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Microsoft was willing to share their source code. Apparently Google was not. I back the government getting a copy of the source code for bug fixes, etc.

Same Story here -- No Google in sight

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's been pitching their solutions at us too. We're looking at a multi-million dollar contract for a messaging/collaboration change.

We're fine with Google's application suite--it has great cross-platform functionality. The kicker is still data in Google's cloud. If they'd let us put a cluster on-site we could do it, but due to data protection requirements, we're not willing to house it off-site (even though their security protections may be better than ours). If they'd just get over the do it in our cloud thing, we might get somewhere with it.

We already have issues with them in other collaboration projects using cloud storage. We have a mandated requirement to identify locations where data is stored. We simply need to list the locations data is or can be housed, but they won't give data center addresses. We don't care where it is, but our contracts require the locations to be on file.