Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
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.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
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?
unified/consolidated email
Lots of ways to do that
enhanced security."
This clearly indicates bribery, no one hears "Microsoft" and thinks enhanced security.
There are lots of ford dealerships. DOI should be looking for email/office/whatever with X requirements, not an email solution from X.
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
That is all.
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.
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".
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.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Um, what if you need your part to be precisely 5 meters +/- 0.0005 m?
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.
Welcome to the government, my friend.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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
Ken
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.
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.
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.
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.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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.
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.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables