Slashdot Mirror
Google Apps Beats Office 365 For US Dept. of the Interior Contract
angry tapir writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior has picked Google Apps to provide cloud-based email and collaboration applications to about 90,000 staffers, choosing Google's services over Microsoft's Office 365. Google had sued the U.S. agency in 2010, claiming its requirements for the contract tilted the scales unfairly toward Microsoft. Google eventually dropped its lawsuit last September."
This shouldn't come as any surprise, since Google didn't have an outage due to a "leap year glitch". Any wonder why they skipped over Office?
What is the matter with these people? Anybody can load Libre Office, for free and legally, then use the thing for the rest of their lives without paying a cent. It is good old traditional office software, easily used by anybody familiar with any other office suite. No internet connection is necessary for normal use. There are no glaring security holes. How can these dopey bureaucrats pass up a deal like that?
I've been here about a decade. I've seen lots of spammers come and go. I've come to accept Goatse Guy and the Nigger Troll as part of what it costs to give and get my bit in an Internet forum. And that's OK. I browse at -1 to get both the grit and the gloss.
There are now some folk well paid to get top post, and comment on that post until the comments scroll down ad-infinitum of course. Maybe their managers think they're acheiving something on /., and if they're paying for that play I'm fine with that. Those guys gotta eat. One day we'll miss the "frosty piss" first post.
Before these folks were incompetent, and coudn't even string together a sentence in common Englush. They have evolved. Now they have skills and are getting better at it. But they miss that certain something - that "I don't know what" that moves them from marketing to legit. That's fine for me, because I always look closely at the new thing, but these new folk look to do an end-around flanking maneuver.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
DOI's original RFQ specified that only Microsoft solutions would be considered
Only after Google sued them (and then dropped the lawsuit) that DOI agreed to drop the "M$ only" clause
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I await the day when some unknown 5-star general suddenly realises that Powerpoint is a waste of resources, though I doubt it will happen in my lifetime
The military calls it "death by powerpoint". Gen. James N. Mattis & Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster are such commanders that have banned or severely restricted use of powerpoint under their command.
They found that their staff was spending more time preparing fancy slides than actually analyzing information or planning missions/operations. So they scrapped it.
15 years ago, I worked for Lockheed Martin. Our customer, the US Navy, told us they didn't like Powerpoint presentations, as their information density is so extremely low. That wasn't a general though, so I guess it doesn't count.
Yes, the low information density of Powerpoint presentations is by design, and is allegedly a good thing. Me, I've always thought they were for stupid people. If you can't read high density information, you shouldn't be promoted to make important decisions.
As a government employee who had to plan and deal with sharing of information across thousands of systems, I often sat across the table from Microsofties who claimed that their software met our compatibility needs even though it didn't have even a basic IP stack at the time. We supported military engineers worldwide who had Sun, Apollo, Masscomp, Pyramid, and dozens of systems running a number of operating systems. Yet, they all had one thing in common - they were all POSIX compliant, and there were common tools and interfaces across all of them. Even when Windows finally got a native (sorta) IP stack, it still never got POSIX compliance. POSIX is a set of IEEE standards initiated in the 1980s, and was adopted into the NIST FIPS standards. The POSIX standards continued to develop until just 4 years ago. Most of the popular operating systems today are POSIX compliant, even certified. I wouldn't expect you to know that, though, being a MSoftie. Of all *mainstream* operating systems in use today, only Windows (in all versions) remains out of compliance. Microsoft has always fought against compatibility and portability rather than work with everyone else. The MSofties I knew were always trying to get us to drop all standards and just buy their stuff, with no care about how we could get it to work with what we already had.