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Google Drops Cloud Lawsuit Against US Government
jfruhlinger writes "A year ago, Google sued the U.S. government because the government's request for proposals for a cloud project mandated Microsoft Office; Google felt, for obvious reasons, that this was discriminatory. Google has now withdrawn the suit, claiming that the Feds promised to update their policies (PDF) to allow Google to compete. The only problem is that the government claims it did no such thing."
It appears Google's Jedi mind tricks won't work on the US government.
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This entire story will be riddled with speculations.
There is Google, ONIX Networking Corp., Microsoft, US federal government (U.S. Department of the Interior), there are too many known and unknown unknowns (to para-quote the former minister of Offense).
It could be that there is private dealing between Google and MS or between Google and the federal gov't. There could be issues surrounding ONIX. There could be anything, from government threats to personal threats. Too many unknown variables.
Thus this is a perfect story, because all comments will be interesting.
You can't handle the truth.
Looks like their open-door policy with the DOJ just got them in trouble. Don't be evil--be brutal.
Except the government is not allowed to discriminate, while you are, and for good reasons. Google sued because it affected them, obviously, but it also affects the citizens since they're the ones paying.
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Mind tricks don't work on me. Only money.
I really want to like Google Docs (especially since I have a good friend who works on them at Google). But as someone who uses excel constantly in my job, and Google Spreadsheets a lot for personal use, there's just no comparison. There's zero possibility of doing what I need to do in gDocs, sadly.
The other option would be: submit a proposal which includes Microsoft Office. I'm sure that Google can figure out how to package and resell it, while making money on their cloud services.
Unless, of course, Office cannot run on their cloud for some technical reason - which means it is broken, and they should concentrate on fixing it, not suing.
The reverse is true - Google had no option to bid on the project, because the RFP specified that the only product that would fulfil the requirements was Microsoft Office.
If the rules require you to have an RFP in the first place, they are intended to support competition. If you carefully phrase your RFP to only permit bids from one vendor, you are circumventing that intention.
It's like you requesting bids from paint manufacturers for white paint to paint your house with, and inserting a clause that says "Must be Dulux® brand paint"
What if the technical reason is "MS Office will only connect to servers which sign their RPC calls with a particular private key (that MS just happens to have)"?
I'm not saying this is the case. It's just trivially easy to ensure that your program* won't play ball with the network services of a competitor.
* Closed source and un-cracked
it's printed on, when one is dealing w/ those whose given word is meaningless, and who don't understand the commitment of a firm handshake.
Should have gotten it in writing, w/ formal signature, from someone w/ the authority to make that commitment.
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Obama should simply invite everyone over for pizza and beer!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Then the agency shouldn't put out an RFP. They should issue a purchase order, as a sole-source procurement. It's either an open bid or it isn't. If the government agency is pretending it's an open bid when it isn't, then the agency is both misrepresenting its business dealings to the public and wasting bidders' time.
Do you really think that Google will replace Microsoft and do the same job? I don't think so...
In the last 15 years that I've been working full time with all sort of products (Microsoft, Apple, Google...), I can say that even if Microsoft's products are not necessarily the best products taken one by one, all together they are excellent.
I've been trying to work with Gmail myself to replace Exchange... this was the worst nightmare... for a small company, support is poor... sync does not work all the time...
On the other side, Exchange/Outlook never failed on me... even if hosted, it always worked fine. it may be more expensive, but at least it works fine.
All my computers are Macs (MacBook Pro, Mac Pro.)... but I'm still using Microsoft products (Office 2011) to get the work done correctly...
For now, Microsoft/Office is here to stay...
Either that, or they were not written with MS office!
The government has so many legacy documents in Word. The entire defense industry revolves around Power Point (don't get me started, seriously everything is in Power Point). Asking for Microsoft Office as a requirement is completely legitimate.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Yeah, it's kind of hard to tell who is lying. That's why we need to do a Google search on it.
(Lame attempt at a joke. I may have excellent karma, but I'm sure this will drop it.)
Which is the key phrase in this whole business.
Among other things, it means that if the feds do not change things so only MS Office is acceptable, Google can restart the lawsuit with no problems.
Essentially, this is a peace offering by Google - "we want you to fix the objectionable part of your original RFP, and we'll stop suing you to let you do that in peace. BUT, if you don't fix it, we'll see you in court"
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Standard Operating Procedure in the DoD and defense industry is to email a word doc as an email attachment. They almost never send any useful information in the body of an email, even if that context is plain text.
The government is required by law to put out an RFP for nearly every purchase. Bush and Cheney both should have been impeached for violating this law.
I'm sure IBM, Oracle, Google, Redhat and any number of other IT firms could provide cloud services and support for MS Office products.
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Actually the bidding process is there so that businesses can bid way under cost, steal the money, and then demand more money or if it's a small business just declare bankruptcy spawn a new corp and rinse/repeat. I'm not familiar with these large scale IT contracts but that's the way it works in government contracting for construction (roads and such).
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Only by subcontracting to Microsoft, and only if Microsoft was willing. Thus far Microsoft has maintained an extensive code portfolio exclusively for its own cloud offerings. Note that it's sometimes fine for a government agency to sole source a particular purchase. Sometimes there's only one viable choice. But the agency simply needs to explain why it should be sole source and not pretend the earth is flat. Google was correct here: the Department of the Interior was pretending the earth is flat.
I don't know that purchasing licenses of Office should be considered "subcontracting" Microsoft. I would assume that the enterprise license of Office would barely be a blip on the radar compared to the manpower/support costs.
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Let me rephrase the item below. Let's say someone contracts my company to write an iOS app and one of the deliverables is a working/running copy of the software on an iPod Touch. I would not consider the fact that I have to buy and deliver an iPod Touch to my client as "subcontracting Apple."
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That's an awful analogy.
This is more like you request bids for house painting but require that the painters use the paint that Painting Company A manufactures. Painting Company A will not sell the paint to other professional house painters, but it will apply that paint to your house. This becomes not an open bidding process, but a price request from Painting Company A.
Now, somebody will fix my bad analogy and eventually, a good one will emerge.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The difficulty: 100% compatibility is impossible even in theory. All that Microsoft need do is push a patch that adds or changes some minor feature, and now its competitor is no longer "100% compatible." So a Microsoft troll can always argue the "100% compatible" point, and win it by moving the goalpost. (I don't argue that you are a Microsoft troll, by the way: merely that you are advancing the argument that a Microsoft troll would advance.)
Of course, in the real world, the goalpost does move, because Microsoft is a monopoly and has captured the government. Microsoft products cannot interoperate perfectly even with themselves (ever try to open a 10-year-old document?). Nevertheless, failure to interoperate perfectly with Microsoft products dooms all competition to irrelevancy as "non-mainstream." Any non-Microsoft software, to be successful, has to address a problem for which Microsoft does not have even a bad solution. For instance, software to simulate the operation of a chemical plant might stand or fall on its technical merit. But even that might fail, because it likely has inputs and outputs that are tables of numbers, and therefore will face "100% compatibility" issues with Excel.
Given that no government at this point can intervene without crippling itself - governments run on PowerPoint, and Microsoft has them by the short hairs - I don't see the situation as changing very soon.
In the bad old days when IBM owned a monopoly on the computer business, there were a number of Federal Information Processing Standards that all but stated that procured equipment should have on the nameplate the ninth, second and thirteenth letters of the Latin alphabet as used in US English. They were opened for competitive bidding, and you'd think that only IBM could play. But sometimes it lost a bit because it was undercut by either a used-equipment dealer or even one of its own resellers. In fact, IBM used its resellers to prove to several courts that the bidding process was competitive. It would bid the contract at a non-discounted retail price, sell the equipment to a reseller at wholesale, and let the reseller undercut the price. It turned a tidy profit either way, and was still the sole manufacturer of the equipment. But as long as there was the formality of a competitive bid - which it lost - competing manufacturers had no legal leg to stand on.
Except the government is not allowed to discriminate, while you are, and for good reasons. Google sued because it affected them, obviously, but it also affects the citizens since they're the ones paying.
Let's get it straight - Google threatened to sue, did a lot of bitching and moaning, and ultimately went home because they knew they had no case.
Most U.S. government agencies are as head over heals into vertically integrating microsoft solutions as could possibly imagine. Problem is that Microsoft and their zombie government followers (not all are followers but most in IP are) sell office 365 to management as a "cloud" solution when it's obvious that it's just managed exchange with a lightweight web version.
True cloud versions exist ENTIRELY within the browser without binary executables you have to install.
they lost the brief they had saved in Google Docs.
Wait for the changes THEN drop suit. Don't preemptively do so on "promises", especially from the USA.
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That happens all the time (in my paint analogy). Customers want a certain brand, certain color, etc. I don't see the difference (or why my first comment was considered 'trolling', but whatever). MS Office has a 94% market share (if you believe http://www.dailytech.com/Office+2010+to+Launch+Today+Microsoft+Owns+94+Percent+of+the+Market/article18360.htm), then why wouldn't any company, gov't or otherwise, be justified in requesting it?
They must have settled out of court. :P
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