You have to keep in mind that this is the government we're dealing with here. See, what you're saying actually makes sense, so obviously it's completely out of the question.
Remember, government policy decisions (of all kinds) are usually made like this: "Ok, so this is fucked up? It's not going to work? It's going to cost too much and piss off everybody in the world? Perfect, let's do it that way, then."
This move is good, but it's still just a drop in the bucket, and they'll never drop ms-exchange while they're on their current contracts. The DoD likes to sign contracts that it can't get out of, even when the service provider is doing a terrible job managing and/or maintaining the network.
NMCI, the Navy - Marine Corps network, is one of the worst intranets I've ever seen. Poor support, poor reliability, slow clients, crash-prone servers, poorly implemented and mandatory smart-card login, not nearly enough bandwidth to go around, etc., etc., etc. When the senior enlisted man in the Corps can't log in for a week because his account got borked, there's a problem. There are platoons that have hired independent contractors to come in and build small networks that actually work, and they only use the government computers when it's absolutely necessary. Every single user of NMCI hates it and wants it dropped like a bad habit.
But they won't replace it because they locked themselves into a ten year-long contract and the brass says that it would cost billions to fix the damned thing. That's a poor excuse - the DoD wastes billions of dollars every month. Seriously, if you work for the DoD, don't expect anything related to your computer to work properly.
"This is a bad idea? It's not going to work? It's going to cost way too much? It's going to piss off everybody who has no choise but to use it? Perfect."
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Remember, government policy decisions (of all kinds) are usually made like this: "Ok, so this is fucked up? It's not going to work? It's going to cost too much and piss off everybody in the world? Perfect, let's do it that way, then."
This move is good, but it's still just a drop in the bucket, and they'll never drop ms-exchange while they're on their current contracts. The DoD likes to sign contracts that it can't get out of, even when the service provider is doing a terrible job managing and/or maintaining the network.
NMCI, the Navy - Marine Corps network, is one of the worst intranets I've ever seen. Poor support, poor reliability, slow clients, crash-prone servers, poorly implemented and mandatory smart-card login, not nearly enough bandwidth to go around, etc., etc., etc. When the senior enlisted man in the Corps can't log in for a week because his account got borked, there's a problem. There are platoons that have hired independent contractors to come in and build small networks that actually work, and they only use the government computers when it's absolutely necessary. Every single user of NMCI hates it and wants it dropped like a bad habit.
But they won't replace it because they locked themselves into a ten year-long contract and the brass says that it would cost billions to fix the damned thing. That's a poor excuse - the DoD wastes billions of dollars every month. Seriously, if you work for the DoD, don't expect anything related to your computer to work properly.
"This is a bad idea? It's not going to work? It's going to cost way too much? It's going to piss off everybody who has no choise but to use it? Perfect."